Fate Phantasm
by Yakumo-san
Summary: In a series of events that include: being rudely awakened to an unpleasant surprise, right in the middle of the night; getting thrown into one of Yukari's gaps; and meeting a mysterious blonde girl in red... Hakurei Reimu has only lived through what is the opening scene - the opening scene of one of Gensokyo's greatest Incidents ever to come.
1. Phantasm 0: Prologue

**Phantasm 0 - Prologue:**

A phantasm, something that exists only in perception, devoid of any real base or foothold in reality.

But what is this reality that we speak of? Is it what we see? is it what we feel? Why do we acknowledge the existence of light then, when it cannot be touched? Why do we acknowledge of the wind, when we can never see it in truth, when we can only observe its effects as trees sway and leaves are blown away?

_What is reality? Does such a thing truly exist, or is even reality itself something controlled by human subjectivity?_

It is doubtful that you haven't heard of at least one of the many miracles littered throughout mankind's history, nor that you're unknowing of a few of the gods and mythical creatures that also populate it.

You could be like the average human in nowadays society and consider them as myths of past legends, stories made up for children, or to inspire awe from the uneducated populace.

Or you could be like the ever dwindling amount of people that believe that they are real, that they were truly beings of flesh and blood, that with their body and soul, they truly walked this earthly plane and left unforgettable reminders of their deeds.

_Heroic Spirits, Divine Spirits;_ where do they come from? How is it that even amidst the modern and developed world of the present, it is still argued that such scientifically abstract things could have existed?

All the answers are held within the concepts of faith and belief, of _human_ faith and belief.

Human belief is one of the most powerful notions in existence; it influences everything that is: _Gods_ are past _elementals_, spirits that through the belief of women and men, became beings of the _Divine_ ranks.

_Youkai, Phantasmal Beasts,_ they are also similar: they represent the fears of humans, the fear of the unknown, the fear of what mankind does not know – all of it taken to the extreme.

And_Magic_ is no different - why are the _sacrements_ of the _Church_ so effective? Why is it that all their '_incantations_' are so efficient, even though that if we were to follow _thaumaturgical_ rules, the lesser mystery should mean a loss of power? _Simple_, because it is in these rituals that so many people put their faith.

Belief is everywhere, belief shapes everything.

But belief in the mythical is slowly waning. There has always been that one beast called _Science_. It is an interesting beast that cannot be denied... but it is savage in its advance. Well, what else to expect from the child of humanity? It reflects its progenitor perfectly.

The moment human beings came into the world, was the moment science was also born. That one thing slowly began gnawing away since then at the unknown, erasing the supernatural at a slow but steady rate – as time progressed, the shroud created by mysticism and magic was slowly disintegrated with the advance of civilizations.

It is already the 21st Century. A few more decades, and it'll already be a millennial milestone since the _Age of Gods_ perished in Japan. Well, perished from the surface of _Gaia's_ Japan that is; it is still alive here, existing in this _Phantasm_, in this _Dream of Reality_.

There is however the saying claiming that: "everything that has a beginning, has an end." It is a universal rule from which nothing is exempt. The coming of the Solar System's _Aristoteles_ in the far future, does nothing but reinforce this fact.

But people break rules in the end, don't they? It could even be argued that rules were made to be broken in the first place. When one does so, things become so much more interesting.

That is why, there is a _certain person _- she can do many things, for she has been gifted with extraordinary powers. Reality bends at her will, physics, nature and even, magic also bend at her will – but she is still inside a body, a container that has limits.

Not everything is within her reach - not even she is omnipotent, for to seek omnipotence is to wish for the impossible in itself.

Yet, words have reached that person's ears about an "_omnipotent_" wish-granting device... or so it is labeled. If it really was omnipotent, that would be contradicting the previous statement, but that device's power is one that definitely cannot be ignored - when given a way to achieve something, it will achieve it flawlessly, no matter what that goal is in question.

What do belief, dreams, existence and omnipotence have in relation to the subject that I'm trying to elaborate here?

The belief and dreams of humankind, the existence of myths and magic, they are all stored in one large repository, transcending time and dimensions – a place that holds absolute power over all that has existed, all that exists, and all that is to exist.

_Its name is Akasha, the Void, the Root Of All Things._

Now, a greater canvas has been drawn. A canvas that encompasses all that's been mentioned beforehand, weaving together the most flawless of arts for the technical observer and the most enjoyable of works for the generic viewer - a pleasing experience for the artist and audience.

The canvas shall be brought to life, from drawing to scene, from scene to play... and so shall begin the realization of the phantasm-

-or rather, it has already begun. It is at its first stage, and the playable character is none other than the puzzle's central piece. She, perchance, conveniently sleeps at the _Hakurei Shrine_.

It is time to awaken, _Eternal Shrine Maiden._


	2. Phantasm 1,0

**Phantasm 1.0 – Awaken into Darkness**

The sound of a blade being unsheathed. A glimmer within the darkness. Moonlight flashing upon moving cold steel.

I was tired, too tired to know what I should make out of this vision. It didn't seem like there was an intruder since the alarm charms I set up at the entrance had yet to go off. Well, "it didn't seem" indeed, because I was simply too tired to give a damn about it. I couldn't even be bothered to scan for spiritual anomalies.

Yes, in the end, I just wanted to sleep.

As hard as I tried to fall asleep though, I found it impossible. I just couldn't dismiss the glint that I saw earlier, it kept coming back, gnawing at my feeling of security.

Why, you ask? It could've simply been a shooting star, or the reflection of moonlight from some shiny surface as far as things went.

Let me tell you why I was so disturbed by that glimmer: there was nothing in the shrine that could actually reflect moonlight. Everything was composed either of wooden or bamboo materials: the walls, the furniture, the floor, nothing at all could have caused that reflection. It wasn't like I had polished them either - my habitation, while not decrepit, was still far away from being sparkling clean.

I thought a little bit more about all this, but eventually, all will I had to remain awake was quickly lost.

Let's face it, it was around midnight, and I had a long, tiring day. I wanted to escape to the world of sleep, and it wasn't like I was being refused either – the doors of slumber were wide open to me.

I let myself sink deeper into the warm comfort of my futon, hoping that eventually, with time, this uneasy feeling would come to pass and I'd finally have a good night's sleep.

For sure, time passed, but much to my dismay, the uneasiness didn't. Rather, it kept increasing by the second, crawling up to my heart, slowly evolving into some sort of fear.

I bore this torture for a minute, maybe two, however, I could only last for so long without losing it.

I snapped. I sat up on the futon. I rubbed my eyes and let out a small groan of discomfort, silently cursing whoever was disturbing my sleep pattern.

Once I became relatively "awakened", I focused my mind and swept my bedroom, searching for any form of spiritual disturbance, looking everywhere, scrutinizing the corners, the floor, and even the ceiling.

However, as I finished, my senses still told me that there was no one in the shrine. Well, technically speaking, there was one person - me, Hakurei Reimu, the shrine maiden that actually happened to live here.

We already know that though, I think.

Anyway, at that moment, I should have gone back to sleep. Note the probability in "should have". If it wasn't for my instinct, that probability would not have been there. But my said instinct kept urging me not to let my guard down. It incessantly hammered that the glimmer couldn't have appeared by itself, as I was absolutely immobile when I saw it.

"Something other than myself had to have moved," I whispered into the night.

I agreed with my instincts. They had never failed me before.

That is why I cleared my throat, and after taking in a deep breath, I asked with a tone as firm and menacing as I could:

"Who goes there?"

I waited for a moment. I waited for the sound of movement, I waited for the creaking of wood as someone stepped onto the old and used planks that made up the shrine's floor, for the flow of od in the air to be suddenly disturbed, giving me the telltale sign that something was moving.

But nothing answered. There was only the chirping of the crickets, their sharp, repetitive chant playing against the background of the silent night.

It wasn't like I expected an answer anyways; sane thieves seldom announce their arrival.

Thinking of thieves, the thought of a youkai paying me a nocturnal visit for vengeance suddenly came up. It sounded fairly possible, since the number of people I had beat up over the last month was greater than the combined amount of times Marisa and Yukari barged into my shrine unannounced. If you have no idea how many times the latter is, the saying "as numerous as the stars" would be fairly adequate.

I reached for my _gohei_, the trusty ceremonial wand that served as the catalyst for my spiritual incantations. Once I took hold of it, I then checked my sleeves and pockets to verify how many ofuda talismans were left from the previous day. As I took them out one by one, I could only count only about a dozen.

That was a meager amount. Yet, seeing that it should be only one or two youkai that I was dealing with here, I reasoned that it should be more than sufficient for the task at hand.

I stuffed the ofudas back into my clothes, and with my _gohei_ gripped firmly in my right hand, I walked out of my bedroom, ready for any encounter.

The wooden parquet ominously creaked as I stepped into the shrine's worship area. The atmosphere was all but agreeable, with an unpleasant draft blowing onto my bare shoulders. I shivered as the cold slowly assaulted my body.

My eyes were darting left to right, continuing to keep track of my surroundings, in case there was movement within the shadows.

The lighting in the room was very dim. There was only one source of light at that time – the moon. The moonlight, while strong, only lit up the floor below as the roof prevented it from reaching anything further up.

_I'd had it with all of that darkness._

I reached for one of my ofudas and infused it with spiritual force. The flow of energy made it glow with a half purple, half reddish tint, the intensity being enough to serve as a makeshift torch.

It's amazing how a piece of paper with some words written on it can be so useful at times.

I brandished my "torch" to light the entire room. The walls appeared as if they had been smeared in unnatural color, permeated with a magenta tint.

Pretty natural, considering what I was using as my light source.

But I hadn't come here to admire the nice colors I could make with my _miko_ powers. I was here to root out the cause of these anomalies I had seen earlier. Seeing that I was still unable to pick up anything out of the ordinary here, I was becoming more and more frustrated.

_What if it was all a dream?_ Anything could happen when one was sleepy. Perception became vague and unclear, hearing turned as acute as the ears of an old man with half a working tympani.

_I will find out now_. Such a ridiculous measure I had in mind seemed like anything but proportionate to the situation, yet it was the fastest way to discover if my mind was playing tricks on me, or if there really existed a youkai or person sneaky enough that I couldn't detect their presence.

I slammed my "torch" down into the ground, and a magical glyph quickly imprinted itself onto the wooden floor.

That was the sign for me to begin my incantation.

Of course, as Japanese is my native tongue, the incantation should appear in a language no different from what you're currently reading. In my opinion, though, some things taste better while raw. Like _sashimi_ for example.

"_**Kage wa kieyo.**_

_**Omae ga fushi no shudan wo motte.**_

_**Kono te ni wa hikari. Kono te koso ga subete to shire."**_

Light coming from the ofuda enveloped me. Soon after, it would envelope the entire shrine as well.

The premise of this spell was to reveal anyone or anything using magical concealment and trickery. To give you an idea of how powerful that spell was, it is was supposed to dispel illusionary and invisibility magic on the scale of an entire forest.

_Why did I know a spell of this amplitude?_ You'd ask. Well, the explanation is pretty simple: while the the residents of _Eientei _and I were on fairly amicable terms, that didn't guarantee that, things could _maybe_ go haywire due to a misunderstanding one day.

This was one of the many spells I had come up with to counter their strong points. To be most correct though, this was to counter Reisen's strong point – she could create illusions and induce madness on a whim, so being able to dispel these was a great help.

I digress though. Back to what was happening.

I was immersed into the light for a few seconds. It was a light of an immeasurable radiance, doubtlessly fitting for the concept that it embodied - "revealing". However, unlike sunlight, this wasn't anywhere near blinding. I could keep my eyes open without being fazed at all.

Not even once did I blink.

The light began fading, and the darkness of the night returned slowly.

I focused my mind one more time to search for any signs of spiritual pressure. If there was nothing, it really meant this time that there was nothing.

I began the search.

And immediately, I felt it. A weak spiritual presence that I hadn't picked up previously.

_So there was someone after all._

"Show yourself! Come out, I know that you're-"

I stopped. A very unpleasant sound and feeling were the cause of my interruption.

I heard some sort of _fuitch _noise. The same one heard whenever sharp steel violated the integrity of flesh. The sensation that a cold wind had just blown through my chest also came alongside that unsettling sound.

"_What could that be?"_ I asked myself, refusing to believe what I had already guessed.

I knew deep inside that something bad had happened. I knew that if I was going to look down, I would regret it, very much.

But curiosity was killing me from the inside; or could it even kill me anymore?

A blood-soaked blade was emerging from my upper left chest.

There was a patch of deep-red around the wound, expanding at a very quick rate. It wouldn't be long before my light-red shirt was recolored into a darker shade.

I had been stabbed from the back, and my heart had probably ended up as a brochette.

Something that was late to the instant caught up when I understood my current state. Oh how I wished that I never did.

Agonizing pain shot across my chest. I felt all of my blood pouring out of the hole which had been carved through my body... it was _sickening_.

I was scared.

I was hurt.

I tried to yell.

What came out though couldn't even be described as a yell. My punctured lung produced nothing other than strangulated, garbled utterances.

I choked miserably as the disgusting taste of blood flooded my mouth.

Subconsciously inching forwards, I tried to get away from the person that had run me through. I still had the will to live, I didn't want to die here, it was too sad of a fate, it was too... sudden.

I slid alongside the blade, trying to remove it from me. Every _single_ centimeter of my advance was punctuated with absolutely, utterly unbearable dolor.

I got it out of me eventually. But that blade took away also most of the life that I had left.

The next step I took quickly ended up in catastrophe.

I stumbled. My body fell forwards, all strength having now deserted my legs. Was it because I was really dying that badly or because I was just scared to no end? I will never know.

I heard the assassin mumble something as I fell.

"... what is this sorcery?!"

I turned my head to have a look backwards. I wanted at least to see the face of my killer.

Who was it? Why had they done that? Why had the _spellcard _rules not been respected?

This crime would not go unpunished. I had friends, lots of friends. They were going to hunt down whoever killed me. They would reduce him or her to nothingness. He or she would suffer a fate worse than death, all at the hands of the powerful beings that I had become familiar with. They would hunt him down.

_Would they?_

I began thinking about everyone that I knew. _What was I to them? Was I a friend? An acquaintance?_

_Or was I just the Hakurei Shrine Maiden, nothing more, nothing less?_

Maybe that my death would go unnoticed. Maybe that everyone would eventually forget me, like a wave tossed into the ocean.

Marisa would go back to her research of Magic.

Suika would impose herself on someone else.

Yukari would just find a new shrine maiden.

_I would be quickly forgotten by everyone, no, __**everything**__._

I felt empty inside as I thought of all this. Who knows, maybe that I even cried.

I was utterly scared.

I wanted to escape death. I didn't want to be forgotten.

Everything appeared to be in slow motion. It felt like a minute since I had tumbled forwards.

My head was still turning. Nevermind that, it had turned enough for me to glance at the assassin from the corner of the eye.

_Who was it?_

I wanted to know, I wanted to know at all costs.

...

What I saw wasn't the assassin.

I saw gaps. Yukari's gaps, with the signature eyes glaring at me from within them.

That is when I understood the reasons behind the assassin's words earlier.

Impaling me through the chest wasn't what he had intended. He probably had gone for a straight, quick and efficient kill by decapitating me. However, his blade somehow ended up into Yukari's gap, and came out as a thrust, piercing my chest.

"_Yukari is at work here_." That was the only thing that I had the time to tell myself. The moment I acknowledged this information, was the moment that the flow of time magically reverted back to a natural pace.

I should have hit the hardened wooden floor, my head should have smashed against it. However, as always, note the "should have", because in fact, I didn't. Rather, I felt like I was falling, falling and falling without end.

It was a free-fall into an unending darkness.

I spent a long time "unconscious".

By definition, unconscious beings don't know what's going on. They cannot feel anything, they cannot hear anything, all of their senses are shut down. However, in my case, I could somewhat have an understanding of how much time was passing by.

The amount, at that point, had already been too much. I decided to wake up.

Touch was the first sense that came back to me, starting at the head. Slowly, I began to appreciate the caresses of a warm and pleasant wind blowing onto my cheeks.

Smell was the second sense that returned to me. It allowed me to pick up an otherworldly aroma, so sweet that I could feel it seeping into my soul.

Hearing came third, as the loud, yet unnaturally serene howl of the wind came to my ear. Judging from the nature of the background noise, and how the atmosphere in general sounded, I was in a large and open space.

What was the fourth that came back, you're eager to know, right? Well, to be honest, _there was no fourth_.

All of the rest that hadn't been working suddenly restored themselves in the most chaotic and jumbled of manners. It was as if someone had literally jammed them into my body.

That was sudden. Too sudden for me.

My body jolted upwards, and my eyes shot open.

I saw a young woman, one that I had never seen before.

She had deep olive eyes that were staring at me. Her skin was fair and white. Golden-blonde hair adorned her head, straight, and with strands so finely combed that they resembled golden threads.

The most striking thing about her though, was the dress she wore.

Having an occidental flair to it, it was of a dominant crimson color, with some white silk fabric making up the areas covering the bosom and chest. Sewn onto the edges of the dress, were extravagant golden linings.

I had rarely seen clothes as these. They were a lot akin to Yukari's.

That girl wasn't Yukari though. She wasn't a youkai... but I couldn't say that she was human either.

I could only stare at her wordlessly, mouth agape. Sitting there opposite of me, with flowers surrounding us everywhere, this felt like a totally otherworldly experience to me.

"_Wait, am I not in the afterlife though?_" I thought as I remembered that I supposedly had "died". _It would be natural for her to seem otherworldly..._

"So you awakened from your slumber." the girl said.

Her voice was deep and somewhat masculine.

"Where are we? Have I already died?" I asked.

A smile appeared on her lips. Shortly afterward, she then spoke her first words to me, a significant turn of phrase that somehow, would embed itself into my heart.

"The first question, I was about to ask you. The second, you should have. Note the "should have", since in fact, you did not."

**Phantasm 1.0 - END**


	3. Phantasm 1,1

**Phantasm 1.1 – Saber, Crimson Beyond a Dream**

Have you ever felt that one feeling? The one that appears whenever you meet someone and know that he or she is "special" in some sort of way? I'm not speaking about infatuation or anything here, I'm rather referring to these individuals that can draw your attention and fascination just by _being_ there.

For example, Yukari: The very first moment I saw her, every single bit of my being froze. Her inhuman, angelic beauty; her purple irises, so deep that they resembled an endless abyss; and last, but not least, the transcendental aura that surrounded her, the proof that she was an existence beyond definition.

I couldn't get her out of my head after our meeting, It was an impossible task. The afterimage of her was so deeply burned into my mind that I couldn't cast her out of it anymore - just by being, she had left an enduring mark on my life.

Though, the Youkai of Boundaries wasn't the only one to have done so. She was one person on a list of many.

Speaking of which, that list had just grown larger.

The blonde girl that stood before me, she had captivated me at the very first sight.

_What was she? Who was she? Why was she here?_

_What had happened to me? Where were we?_

I wanted to ask all this to her as she sat there before me. Question after question piled up in my mind, each one struggling to be the first that I would utter.

I figured though that that some of these, I could answer myself.

The first thing I did was pretty natural, considering that I had just seen a blade stick out from my chest. I looked down to check on it, wondering if I still happened to be a bloody mess.

There was a mess alright, however not the type of mess that I had expected.

I expected stitches, bandages, or any other sign of first aid, but there was nothing as such. My clothes were stained with blood, yes, but the hole that should have been in my chest had totally _disappeared_; there wasn't a single scar left to testify of the event - behind my torn shirt, the skin was without a dent, utterly unscathed.

I was doubtful. I had to bring my hands to my chest to feel the reality of this vision.

My palm quickly began to register the rhythmic pulses coming from within - the final confirmation that my heart was still there - still working.

"_I'm alive," _I mumbled, most relieved.

_But... did I survive?Why is my heart still beating when it got run through like a teriyaki brochette?_

I had little time to enjoy the moment as these other questions began to nag me.

There was no way for a human being to have survived such a wound, even with emergency treatment. I understood that something was wrong, out of place.

I began having second thoughts and repeatedly pressed onto where my wound should've been, verifying that there wasn't some sort of trickery or whatsoever.

"I wouldn't touch your wound with so much carelessness, if I was you," the girl in crimson said.

She stood up, rising from the bed of flowers on which she had been sitting since she greeted me. She reached for my hand, her fingers wrapping themselves around it, soothing as a dove's feathers.

It felt really good, so soothing that before I even knew what was happening, she had already removed my hand off my heart.

The elegance with which she did all this was mesmerizing. Her motion was swift, yet, imbued with incredible gentleness; her movement was large, with an imperious feel- but in the same light, I thought that I could see some traces of modesty from it.

She was a living paradox. That could be seen even with her body. She possessed the height of a fourteen year old child, yet, her form was the one of a fully-grown woman, endowed with fine curves... she looked so mature for one so petite.

Out of all emotions, sadness was the one that gripped me as I watched her. There was something incredibly unfair that I wanted to protest about. It wasn't jealousy that I felt, nor was it reproval.

I wasn't judging her, merely picking up a sensation that had ensnared me the moment she touched me. It whispered to me that she'd had a burden imposed upon her at a very early age, a burden that she never, ever was ready for.

"It may look as your wound has completely healed, but there are things inside that I wasn't able to mend properly. I am after all, no healer by trade," the blonde girl said.

Her olive eyes stared deep into my own eyes for a moment.

"Are you still in shock? I suppose that after having narrowly escaped death, it would be natural to be. Still..."

The blonde girl turned around and took a few steps away from me. She was giving me some space to breathe. Well, to be fair, I had barely breathed at all - I was too busy holding my breath as I looked at her from so close.

"...I have a few questions for you, and I happen to have lost my way around here."

_What should I say? I have to stop being flabbergasted!_

I didn't know where I was, I didn't who this was, nor did I know what to do. At least, I had the luck of not forgetting _who_ I actually was.

I shook my head and slapped my cheeks. I had to knock off my day-dreaming self - it was unacceptable for me to remain as passive as I was any further - I had to speak up, rather than remain still and stare at her like a dumbfounded mute.

"S-sorry for acting like that. It's just that so many things have happened, and I'm not really sure if I'm dreaming or not."

The girl in crimson _hmphed, _amused by what I had just told her_._

"You are not the only soul to be pondering this."

Her gaze trailed off to the horizon. She began admiring the panorama that we had from atop this hill. The forests, the plains, the rivers, the valleys... all of _Gensokyo_'s nature could be appreciated in a single, resplendent view.

The sea of flowers in which we were spread down to the base of the hills below. Once there, the multicolored nature began turning into various shades of greens. Pines, azaleas, and many other varieties of trees formed forests. As one would look farther, the mass of trees would begin to break, ceding their place either to small elevations, streams, or open plains.

This pattern continued all the way to the center of _Gensokyo_, where the environment became quite different.

Youkai Mountain stood in the middle of the land, its peak literally piercing the heavens above. Waterfalls sprouted all around its sides, sourced from the pristine, perennial white snows nestled around the summit. To the eyes of the unfamiliar, there were no more distinguishing features after this, since all the rest that was observable on the mountain was shrubbery. Using some familiar landmarks though, one could quickly point out where the Moriya Shrine and the Tengu village were located.

As one's gaze moved on to the east, they could see something a bit different: a valley snaked from south to north, stretching about five kilometers long. The Human Village happened to be on one of the slopes of the said valley, although it was impossible to see it from this angle. An attentive observer though, could at least guess at the presence of human life in that area, if they had an eye sharp enough to notice the rice-fields.

I ended up watching the scenery as well. Standing up, I gazed with her, as if we were both strangers that had just been dumped into an unknown land.

Why? I never knew before that such a place existed. Even though I had seen _Gensokyo_ from the sky countless times before, flying above it, nothing ever had a characteristic, picturesque flair like this.

_But.._

_I have seen this scene before, _I began telling myself as I stood amidst the flowers.

I noticed the clustered fields of sunflowers, about a kilometer away from here. The Garden of the Sun was nearby, so it became obvious that I must had come here one a previous occasion, during the incident where ghosts began loitering about _Gensokyo_ in masse.

_I wondered_. I wondered if the reason everything looked so different, the reason why everything, including _Gensokyo_, held an unnatural splendor at that instant, was this person standing in front of me.

_Speak Reimu, speak! You're making a fool out of yourself!_

I wanted to speak. I really wanted. Being a docile little girl wasn't reflective of my identity at all as the _miko_, or rather, as the _shrine maiden_ of the Hakurei Shrine.

So I tried to speak. I even took a step forward.

But I blundered somewhere, perhaps due to overexerting my injured body. Whatever it was, it caused a strong pain inside my chest. It stung, not to the same degree as when I was stabbed, but still unpleasant.

I let out a small _argh_, slapping my hands onto my chest. My muscles contracted, and I immediately bent over forwards due to the pain.

"Be still, this will happen if you move too abruptly."

The girl in crimson had moved to my side and helped me support myself. Or was it to my front? I didn't know, since my eyes had squeezed themselves shut due to the pain. All that I felt was the touch of her hands as she held me up. She was strong, _too strong_. That little figure of hers, these small, delicate hands - she possessed far too much strength for such a form.

I was beginning to doubt the very reality of what I was seeing.

_Am I still sleeping?_

_Is this really all a dream? A phantasm?_

_Will I wake up any time soon?_

The pain receded, slowly. Still, I didn't open my eyes for a moment - I remained hunched forwards as well, not wanting to move.

I wanted to wish one more time that this had all been a dream and that I would wake up soon, though I knew deep inside that that was merely delusion.

Also, I wanted to rest.

But even in the privacy of my mind, no reprieve was granted.

In the darkness, I saw a red sparkle - millions of particles gathering together.

'_Is this a vision_?' I asked myself why, wondering why I was seeing things when my eyes were closed?

Then, I realized: _no, it's just my spiritual sensitivity. _You see, being a shrine maiden, I have a naturally heightened perception when it comes to seeing spiritual signatures. That's why, even with my eyes closed, I could "see" what was going on around me.

But this spiritual signature was ridiculous. While the size was about comparable to mine, _being comparable to mine in itself_ was something highly abnormal. No other human I knew of wielded powers of that scale. Heck, even the youkai that I knew of barely matched what I had when it came to raw od, save for the most powerful ones, which at any rate, were on a completely different level altogether.

By the way, if you're wondering what _od _is, that's not normal's antonym being misspelled, or another fancy Japanese dish of mine. Rather, it's one of the many names for spiritual energy.

Returning to the situation at hand though, these millions of particles, shining with brilliant crimson light, wove together, forming a humanoid shape before me - the girl's figure. Strangely, even her _clothes _were leaking spiritual energy.

I felt the need to take another good look at that this person that had so many unusual traits, so I opened my eyes...

...do you know of these sudden sights that simply leave you frozen when you see them? These things so shocking that you'd need to bleach your brain to remove that maddening image that got imprinted on it?

I saw such a sight. I had actually seen it before, but had dismissed it as my eyesight simply being fuzzy from blood loss. I could not believe that anyone was so bold, that anyone could dress as such without showing even a _single ounce of shame_. Not even _Yukari, the queen of flamboyant fashion,_ had clothing that risqué.

What clothing was it, you want to know?

_A see-through dress_, the girl had a see through-dress transparent to the point that she might as well have had nothing there – I could see all of her bare legs, from the top of her thighs to the knee. The rest below was at least covered by massive metallic greaves... but somehow, I felt that this made the matter even _more_ aggravating. I tried hard not to look at the middle, but that glaring white underwear kept monopolizing my attention amidst that ocean of pink flesh. It was like one large spot of ink in the middle of a paper – one just couldn't ignore that.

_She had planned this._

"Y-your panties are showing!" I exclaimed, straightening up and jumping away from her grip. That was close, excessively close for me. I had to get away from her, my self-esteem as a shrine maiden was at risk.

The girl sighed. She showed no sign of shock, simply taking my remark while remaining totally unfazed.

"_I'm not showing them, I'm letting you see._"

That answer hit me like a wooden club to the head, complete with the big _whack _sound.

I took a few further steps back, making sure that I wasn't anywhere near this dangerous person when I retorted back.

"What the hell are you talking about!? This is exhibitionism! Don't you have any kind of pride?!"

The girl opened her mouth to answer, but she did not speak. Her slightly angry expression that had just appeared did not last for long either. She faltered and nearly lost control of her balance, but luckily, she managed to steady herself in time to avoid a nasty tumble.

She pressed her hands against her temples. Her face contorted into a pained grimace.

"H-hey, are you alright?!" I asked.

I ran to her and hovered my hands around her shoulders, in case her state worsened and I had to hold her. She let out a disgruntled complaint, but it was in a weird language that I couldn't understand. The word sounded fairly close to something like _maledictum_.

"I won't argue with you. Know though that questioning your savior's tastes isn't really commendable, especially when she's been given a headache after trying so hard."

I remained silent. Her words were like a bucket of cold water poured over my head.

_She's right._

The disappearance of my wound, I had taken it for granted. The one person responsible for curing me was this girl, so it was rather improper of me to spite her.

"I'm sorry. It's just that your tastes are kinda... _special_."

That was one of the greatest understatements I ever made in my life, but I was trying to be as polite as I could. What else could I have said? "Special" was the only word that came to my head.

The girl removed her hands from her temples and straightened herself.

"Enough of this anyway. I am Saber, a lost traveler, and I wonder if you'd happen to know where we are."

I had not considered it earlier, I was too busy thinking about other things, about all that had occurred as I awoke. But now was when it dawned on me that this girl was even weirder than a _youkai_. She didn't know where we were even though she'd had all the time to treat me and look around, that and she said that she was a traveler, even though there was only _one_ human village in _Gensokyo_... was she an outsider? Could she be one of these many people that got accidentally transported across the _border_?

_Also, that is a strange name..._

"Well, Saber, this is the Garden of the Sun, or at least somewhere close to it" I answered.

Why did I not ask her if she was an outsider you wonder? Well, I wouldn't be answering her question, and besides, she could be an absent minded person that was lost - some people didn't exactly have the greatest of minds, I had met examples of these type of individuals.

Saber let out a _hmmm_ while slightly tilting her head aside. She looked genuinely confused and genuinely clueless.

_Wait. Outside. Border. Yukari._

I recalled the gaps that I saw as I was swallowed into darkness. No, that wasn't darkness – that was another gap of hers as well, a gap of Yukari's. That is why I woke up at a totally different place. Indeed, the Garden of the Sun was nowhere near the shrine. If that disagreeable trickster was behind all this... could it be that the Youkai of Boundaries was also responsible for Saber's arrival in _Gensokyo_?

_No. That's thinking too far ahead. First, I should confirm my initial suspicions._

Saber appeared to be far away in her own world. She was thinking deeply, probably trying to figure out where on earth she had landed.

"Saber," I said, trying to get her attention back, "do you know what _Gensokyo_ is?"

The girl in red shot me a puzzled stare. "Gen...so...kyo?" she repeated after me, syllable after syllable. "I'm afraid that I have no idea of what you're speaking of."

_Well, well..._

Explaining wasn't my forte. If people were to ask me something like '_why does the sun go down'_, or '_why does the wind blow'_, I would simply tell them '_because it does_'. I wouldn't go into details like _how the Earth revolves around the Sun, and has a rotational axis on which it spins_, or how _the variationsin pressure and temperature causes air movement _-

No. Just no.

Anyways, as you've noticed, I despise explaining.

That's why I, after I told Saber: "_Gensokyo_ is a world that's cut off from the rest of the Earth. Think of it as a pocket dimension where elements of the past are kept relatively intact - we still have youkai, magic and all kinds of supernatural stuff running about. You probably got dumped in here by accident; things like that often happen to random people as they get spirited away to this place." ...I was already worn out. I hoped that she wouldn't ask me to elaborate further.

Note how much effort I put into making up an explanation that'd make as much sense as possible to a novice in esoteric terms. I was wishing that Saber would just go: _Yes_,_but how do we get out of this place?_

Imagine my face when I saw Saber's eyes sparkling with curiosity. With her being so short, I couldn't picture anything else in my head other than the image of a child that had just received a new year's gift... or maybe a puppy that had just been given food.

That girl was _famished_ for more information.

"So, you're telling me that this is some sort of _bounded field_ or _reality marble_ that happens to have preserved the _Age of Gods_? You're telling me that _phantasmal beasts_ and creatures that should have since long vanished from Gaia's surface, still populate this land?!"

She turned back to face the panorama that we had admired just moments ago. Saber then lifted her open hand towards the heavens, as if she was trying to grasp them in her palm.

"Fabulous! I knew that there was a meaning to me gaining a body of flesh and blood, a meaning to the prana-rich atmosphere that surrounds us! The gods must be smiling down on me!"

The wind blew, fluttering her dress elegantly. It was another sudden 180 degrees from her previous image. That image of Saber's, it kept changing: at one time, I thought that I was seeing but a mere child with an over-inflated ego, while at another, everything about this girl looked so dignified, so _charismatic_.

That was her paradoxical existence was at work, no doubt.

I wondered if that was it madness that I saw in her for a fleeting instant.

Saber swiveled onto the spot to face me.

"You, girl that looks like a shrine maiden, what is thy name?" the one in crimson asked, quite... passionately.

I was at first, rather unsettled that she knew that I was a shrine maiden, seeing that this issue had not been brought up beforehand. Then, I realized that I held a _gohei_ in my hand, and that _I was supposed to look like a shrine maiden_ anyway, due to my clothes.

I wanted to hit myself due to this stupidity, but I thankfully withheld from doing so. Such an act would make myself look even dumber.

"Reimu, Hakurei Reimu," I said, a bit taken aback by her sudden outburst of enthusiasm.

"That is a fine name. I shall call you Shrine Maiden Hakurei-"

"That's too long. Just call me Reimu." I said, quickly cutting her off. If she was going to address me as Shrine Maiden Hakurei every single time, something inside me was going to die, probably my sanity.

"Shrine Maiden Reimu-"

_Not again._

"Reimu! Plain Reimu!"

_What on earth is so hard about calling someone by their name only?_

Saber annoyingly stared at me as if I was some sort of endangered animal. My hands were beginning to itch – I had been stabbed, nearly killed and somewhat brought back from the realm of the dead. It was natural for me to want to grab an ofuda and blow off some of my stress by blasting the closest person with said charm. A _spellcard _to the face wasn't really dangerous anyways - it'd just hurt a bit...a tiny, tiny bit.

Yeah, totally.

_No Reimu, you will show the world that you're not a brute that resolves everything with violence._

My conscience had the better of me. I relaxed my hand and did not rummage through my sleeve to take hold of a "_pacifier"_.

Saber sighed. "Fine then, Shrine Maiden-"

"Are you doing this on pur-"

"Hush! I haven't even finished my sentence yet. I cannot refer to you as Reimu alone, for I much value public etiquette. I shall instead call you shrine maiden."

… _my head hurts. What's up with that kind of formality?_

I did not bother arguing any further, I figured that it'd be pointless, so I let her call me whatever suited her best. Besides, if I _did_ argue any further, I felt like I was going to lose my temper quickly. That wouldn't be good for my image, as a _miko _turning aggressive because of a naming convention wouldn't seem very... _miko-like, _again.

Then, there was also the fact that I had yet to fully recuperate – I'd have trouble fighting a spellcard duel efficiently in this state.

_What am I speaking of? I bet she can't even use spellcards. She's an outsider after all._

"Alright, call me whatever you want. But what about you? You've introduced yourself as Saber, but what are you exactly?"

Saber eyed me with a glare that suggested suspicion. "What do you mean?"

I was a bit hesitant to further elaborate my point, but I brushed the hesitance aside, thinking that Saber looked like that simply because naturally, a question like that would make most people uncomfortable. I admit that even I myself would feel pretty offended if someone were to ask me a question like: _are you human?_

"You don't look like a Youkai, but you don't look human either. I'm just curious to know what you are exactly, since it's my first time seeing a being like you."

Saber paused and reflected onto my words for a brief moment.

"You are very perceptive, as expected of someone that deals with deities and spirits," she said, nodding to herself in approval.

"Why, thank you."

I waited for her to continue, but Saber didn't say anything. Rather, she kept pondering about _something_ only the gods knew about.

"Hello there?" I asked, walking up to her and waving my _gohei_ in front of her eyes. They were closed as she was thinking though, so in the end, that was a somewhat useless move.

As I was trying to figure out what I should do to get her to speak, it came to me that maybe she was just being insecure about revealing her origins. It could be that she was some sort of half-youkai, half-human; people that belonged to that species had all sorts of physiology after all; half-ghosts, half-phantoms, half-beasts, the list went on.

"It's okay, you don't have to-"

"_Servant_. I am a _Servant_," the girl in crimson declared suddenly, her eyes shooting wide open.

The common usage for the word servant is when people refer to individuals who are under a master, and to whom the latter's will is absolute. That's what I thought that Saber meant when she spoke to me, that she was someone like Sakuya.

That's why I also believed that she had just avoided my question, that she really didn't want to tell me what species she really belonged to.

So I just let it slip.

"You want to go home, right? Back to your master, to where you came from before you got dropped in here," I asked.

"What is the reason of you inquiring this matter?" she said, sounding somewhat mistrusting.

She suddenly got quite worked up when I mentioned her master... I began wondering if she wasn't wandering nearby the border simply because she had run away from him or her.

"I am from the Hakurei Lineage, those that descend from it inherit the job as caretaker of the border," I told her factually.

"Border? You mean the edges of the bounded field that separate this place from the outside?"

"If you want to put it that way, yes..." _Why does she use terms as weird as those? _"...that's why it's my job to ferry back anyone that came from the opposite side of the barrier, well, if they don't end up wanting to stay here that is. Do you?"

"Nay. I need to make haste and return to my _Master's_ side," Saber said, her facial expression hinting worry.

I wondered if she feared punishment... but thinking more on the matter, I realized how very weird it was for her to be a servant. Saber didn't look like someone that would serve at all. Rather, she resembled the type of people who typically enjoyed the luxury of having servants. There was her imperious air, her magnetism, her way of speech and her masculine tone: these were most befitting for a master's personality.

_That's like some Remilia v.2_... _so by logic, would her master look like Sakuya? The mental image of the Maid and the Vampire switching roles is just..._

I shook my head. It wasn't time to be dreaming about such things.

"Alright then, follow me Saber, the shrine's this way," I told the girl in crimson, signaling her to follow me.

"You're aware that you're going to have take it back, are you? Those that tried to kill you settled down there."

"What do you-"

_Hang on, how did she know? I hadn't even mentioned my incident at the shrine to her!_

I immediately turned around. "Who told you about what happened to the shrine?!" I asked menacingly, pointing my _gohei_ at her. It was perhaps a bit over the top when I look back at it, but anyway - what she had just mentioned was definitely eyebrow-raising.

Saber didn't even blink an eye at my actions. She just smiled that same smile she gave me when I first saw her as I woke up.

"Do not mistake me for your enemy. I was told of the tragic fate that befell on you, all by the one that brought you here. That person is also the one that requested me to heal you."

"...someone else that brought me-" I began repeating, only to stop in midway.

I realized that I shouldn't even have repeated after her. I already knew who brought me here, I had figured that out moments ago.

_Yukari. It could only have been Yukari._

"What did she tell you?"

I had to know what the old hag was scheming again.

"That all the answers I sought were within you."

Saber's stare as she uttered these words... it was so deep that I felt a shiver run down my spine as I saw it.

But I steeled myself and didn't show any of what I felt inside. I decided that this girl here had seen enough of the weak and shaken Hakurei Miko. I was going to revert back to the usual Hakurei Miko that everyone knew – the one that didn't stand idiocy, the one that wouldn't hesitate to riddle your sorry butt with exorcism needles.

I was going to find out what gag Yukari was playing, and I was also going to give a very painful lesson to the one that dared stab me from behind. I wasn't going to kill him, since killing something that can permanently die was against my ethics, _but I was going to make damn sure that he remembered the pain._

"If you want to go back, I suppose that you should come with me. Note though that I'll have to clear these idiots that have occupied the shrine first, before being able to send you back" I said.

Saber stroked her chin while appearing rather excited. "I could use some combat to prevent my skills from dulling. I shall help you in your endeavor."

"Whatever, just make sure that you don't get hit when I blast the fool that dared to attack me while I was sleeping!"

I pumped my fist into the air, adrenaline rushing through my veins as I began to consider the various ways available to blow that guy up. I could _Fantasy Seal_ him until he saw so many colors that his vision turned monochrome, I could go slowly wear him down with _Demon Sealing Needles_... or maybe just the plain old fashioned _Hakurei Amulet_ rain.

I didn't have the time to ponder further though.

My chest once again began complaining, pain clawing away at my heart and lung. I was forced to hunch forwards again like an old granny.

"Ouch..."

Obviously, this ungainly scene amused Saber. She chucked, all before telling me, "don't get over enthusiastic, you might get yourself killed."

I decided to ignore her and not respond, since replying back wouldn't help with calming down the pain at all. Having a painful chest while walking towards the shrine, which was quite a distance from here, was also something I did not want to happen.

_Why walking, when you can fly Reimu? _That would be what you'd ask, right?

Simple, because while she never told me, I was pretty certain that Saber couldn't fly, seeing that she was an outsider.

Then, the residents of the Scarlet Mansion were able to fly, while still having originated from the outside world, so perhaps that I was wrong there.

I asked the question to Saber, the question that would usually make sense only in Gensokyo.

"Saber, _can you fly_?"

I've been gifted with the ability to fly for a very long time. The memories of my childhood are very blurred to me, but I am certain that I could already fly at a very early age.

That flight wasn't your generic flight either. While Marisa flies by using magic and Sanae flies by using her powers to create "miracles", I could just fly by thinking of it. There is no spiritual force expanded, not a single effort is needed – I just fly by wanting to fly.

I once asked the one probably responsible for this current ordeal, "_why am I like that?_"

While I never felt at ease whenever near her due to her scheming nature, the Youkai of Boundaries was still like some surrogate mother of mine, so I turned towards her when it came to things I didn't know. She had always been there, always watching over me and teaching me things that I did not know about.

When I asked her question, she told me that: "_it is due to your__**Origin**__, which is 'flying'."_

"_What is an __**origin**__?"_ I obviously inquired.

"_The affinity of your existence. The fundamental part of what you are_," Yukari answered.

I did not know what to make of this at that time.

"Fly?" Saber asked incredulously, "you mean to ask if I can use a _levitation_ spell to move freely about?"

_Gods. My head is hurting again... can't she speak using more simple terms?!_

"Yes," I said, unable to stop myself from evincing a slight bit of annoyance with a badly concealed grimace.

Saber shook her head with a bit of dejection. It didn't look though that the dejection was because she saw my annoyed expression. Rather, she seemed so engrossed into her reflection that I myself had to have faded away into the background, from what I gathered.

"I am no magus, such means are not available to me," Saber said.

… _so we're going to have to walk?_

I was already feeling heavy when I thought of the kilometers that we'd have to travel across before even reaching the Human Village, the latter being on the way to the shrine.

However, Saber hadn't finished talking.

"I do have a suitable alternative though - I can loosen the integrity of the _**prana**_ holding my physical body together. That will allow me to move around freely, like a _spirit_."

… _I'm somewhat becoming used to it, but the jargon this girl is migraine inducing._

While I still had to struggle not to wince from the inside, the knowledge that Saber had some way to keep up with me at least made the day a better one. There would be no three hour voyage back to the _Hakurei Shrine_.

"Alright, I'll be going. You follow closely behind." I told her, while beginning to float away.

Saber gazed at me as I began rising upwards. I guessed that it must had been the first time for her seeing someone flying like that.

"I am a little envious of you, shrine maiden," she said, an odd expression drawn on her face. I couldn't make out if she was proud, happy or a little bit sad. It was really strange.

There was little time for me to figure out what she was thinking though, as shortly after she uttered these words, something beautiful followed.

Saber's body began to fade away, dissolving into thousand of crimson particles_._

_Crimson tears_**. **This view I had basically resembled thousands of crimson tears being shed.

"Lead us to your lost sanctuary," Saber's now disembodied voice told me.

The sun shone brightly above us, and the surrounding scenery was of an untold beauty - this resembled so much the cliché background setting that would appear when heroes were about to begin their journey, heading off to live an adventure of untold greatness.

That perception was rather off though. Instead of some adventure, this actually happened to be the beginning of one of the greatest, most traumatizing farces ever to exist.

**Phantasm 1.1 - END**


	4. Phantasm 1,2

**Phantasm 1.2 – Calm at the Village**

When you see things from high up in the skies, it's really hard to wonder how God or whoever the individual responsible for the first spark of life was, _doesn't get bored._

Watching the same scene over and over again... I can understand that panoramic views are nice to enjoy – I in fact just had that experience minutes ago, but what beauty is there to truly appreciate when we cannot see things from up close? The small details, feeling that we are actually flowing alongside the stream of life rather than stagnantly looking on by the side... that is what truly makes life enjoyable.

Observing a forest from afar, and being in it, are two totally different things. Feeling my back pressed against the rugged surface of a tree, all while I enjoy the shades of the leaves and the pleasant chirps of birds singing... to enjoy life is to do something that cannot be done only with "_seeing_".

Hmm? Ah, yes, I am talking of _God_ instead of gods. While I don't revere that one guy much, I still acknowledge that he's somewhere out there - cause and effect have long already told me to do so. Without anything to spin the wheel of life, yet alone shape the said wheel... then what, no, then _who_ is there to do it?

These incidental thoughts all passed through my head as I was viewing the lands from above, flying through the sky at high altitudes. I was traveling like that because it drastically lowered my chances of running into troublesome _youkai_. After all, while almost everyone and everything in _Gensokyo_ could fly in one way or the other, that did not mean that they could fully abuse that ability as I did. Some merely hovered a few meters above the ground, while others, like the _kappa_, had to rely on technology.

At any rate, lesser _fairies_' wings were too shabby to get them up here; the only creatures that I had a chance of encountering were _karasu_-_tengu_ and other avian-like _youkai_. To minimize the likeliness of it all though, I had already taken a detour that steered me clear of Youkai Mountain, to avoid the nesting ground of these guys.

Being forced into a _danmaku _fight wasn't something I'd want to happen, since I had no time to lose to reclaim the shrine, nor did I want people to know I was currently someone that had been dispossessed - if I could recover my shrine without causing a ruckus, and moreso, without anyone knowing of what happened, it would have been the perfect resolution.

A _miko_ being kicked out of her shrine wasn't something to be very proud of.

The wind caressed my cheeks as I flew, erratically flailing at my clothes which were, by nature, quite buoyant. Baggy _miko_ clothes weren't suited for flight, but at least, I knew that these didn't appear as ridiculous as my older outfit - a full body kimono and a drag-inducing hakama.

As you've guessed, doing high-speed maneuvers in these wasn't very... _practical._

Huh? What do you mean do you mean by "_your hair was purple as well"_? Nonsense, I can't even afford buying hair colorants.

_We... speaking of we, what's happened to Saber?_

I glanced over my shoulder.

The cloud of crimson particles was floating right behind me. The sight was, how can I put it... fascinating. _Ghosts_ and _phantoms_ were always relatively formless when I met them. They'd appear as a crude white blob made up of a spirit and some _od_. The one exception to this was the Lady of _Hakugyoukurou_, but then, she was a special ghost.

Comparing Saber to all of the _youkai_ I knew, the mysterious girl looked like she belonged to a species closer to Youmu's half-phantom and half-human type. There however was a big difference in the fact that Saber actually wasn't half anything – she was a hundred percent human, _and_ a hundred percent ghostly. She had the body temperature of a human, the makings of a human, yet that human body housed not a soul – it _was_ the soul.

"Is there something bothering you, shrine maiden?"

Saber had noticed that I was peeking at her.

"No, not really, I was just checking if you were still following," I said.

"I can't be left behind – you're the one pulling me."

"_Eh? I'm the one pulling her?"_ I thought, trying to figure out what she meant.

"What do you mean?" I asked her.

"I've anchored myself to you, it's as simple as that. As I said before, I can't fly."

"...so you're actually hanging on to me?"

"That would be correct," Saber answered.

It suddenly made a lot more sense why she was so close to me during the entire time we spent airborne. This also left me unsure as to what to tell her next... _should I just keep silent and fly to the village? Maybe I should try talking to her._

I figured that starting a conversation would make the last portion of this trip less dull.

I probed my brain for an interesting matter of subject. Asking Saber what she was exactly would be pretty pointless, as I had already done so earlier - in that light, I thought about other things to discuss about.

It came to my mind that I could ask her about my injury. While I was grateful to still be alive, I wondered how it was possible for someone to mend my heart. I wasn't a _youkai_, so my body couldn't by default couldn't regenerate damage on _that_ scale.

"Saber? Out of curiosity, how did you manage to heal my pierced heart?"

"I didn't – your heart would need to have been damaged in the first place, if you wanted me to do so."

Her words left me in disbelief. I clearly had the memory of having my heart run through.

"What do you mean?"

"The blade missed your heart by a mere millimeter. That still resulted in a punctured lung, but at least, the worst had been avoided - quite the miracle there, would you not agree? Could it be the god or gods that you worship shining down their grace on you?"

"I don't worship any god. I just ask them to lend me their power."

Saber did not answer immediately. There was a short moment of suspension, during which I was fairly certain to have heard a "_huh?"_ coming from her.

"And they grant you their assistance even if you don't praise them? These are strange gods that you have," she said.

"When I say that I don't worship, I mean it in the sense that I don't have anything personal with them. I still acknowledge them as gods, I still recognize their powers – it's just that I don't see them as almighty beings that are worthy of my unadulterated adoration."

I paused, thinking of a way to illustrate with precision how was my stance with all the deities I could call upon. It wasn't long before I found a comparison that I thought would be fairly easy to relate to...

"Think of me and gods as tradespeople. We come together because of the trade – nothing less, nothing more. I give them the cash, the chants of worship, and they give me the products, their divine intervention."

"Isn't that how it works for everyone? You give, and the other gives you back in return for what you've given."

Saber was somewhat right – humans by nature act in ways that are best suited for their own interest. Even charity usually serves a hidden purpose; people want to look good before others, or else, they're after the blessings that could be bestowed upon them by the supposed _'karma_'. It is once again a question of cause and effect, where one expects to be given because they themselves have done so before.

If the world was entirely like that though... it would be a sad place.

But it _wasn't_. There was that thing called '_love_', and that other less intense variant of it called '_friendship_'.

Why did Marisa continuously visit my shrine when Alice could just as easily host her? Why did Sanae continue coming to me heartily, even helping me at times to clean up the shrine? I had clearly said that I'd never lose to her in gathering faith, and that was, in _miko_ terms, an act of war.

A western magician that kept frequenting a _miko_ that didn't know much about western magic, and another _miko_ that visited her rival on a daily basis, even being _helpful_ to her at times... nevermind the good food she cooked as well.

I doubtlessly could ascertain that all this was the end-result of '_love_' and '_friendship_'. The world wasn't white and black.

"Self-interest is indeed something that we all express, but I think that it's not the only thing that living creatures can do. There are times when we can simply invest ourselves wholeheartedly into making the world better for someone or a group of people, not doing so because we expect something in return, but simply because we love them."

The mass of spiritual energy showed signs of agitation as I spoke these words.

"You sound a lot like _him_..."

"Him?" I repeated after her, wondering who was it that she was referring to. _Her master perhaps?_

"_Praetor._ But never mind that, is this a village that I see ahead?"

I turned my head back to look in front of me, her words having caught my attention. Behind the ridge giving onto the valley, rose the Human's Village walls, its foundations made from a mix of concrete and reinforced wood. Fields of agriculture and the rest of the valley quickly filled the background as eventually, the buildings making up the Human Village came into clear view.

As I saw all this, my stomach had to choose the _best_ of times to complain. It gave off a low-toned, but unfortunately, still audible rumble translated as: _I require sustenance._

Now, if there is one thing more embarrassing than having your stomach rumble, it's having that rumble heard by someone else. As much as I had wished for the wind to cover up that noise, Saber had very sharp ears, so she still picked it up.

"Is it your famished belly that I hear?" Saber asked.

I did not want to answer that directly. I just told her what I was planning on doing - the indirect answer was, at any rate, within that response.

"We're going to drop by the village. I haven't eaten since yesterday."

And so, I began lowering my altitude.

Beautiful, but holding on to modesty; finely made, yet insisting that it is but a mediocre build – that is what comes to mind when you look at the architecture and general design of the Human Village. The exotic trees and plants that abound through the settlement really pronounce its agreeable nature, while the wooden buildings emanate a rustic feeling from them.

I had just walked through the southern main gate. The village's roads weren't that big, but they appeared quite spacious at that time due to the small number of people that were on. This was probably because most of the villagers were already out cultivating their crops - I did recall seeing a lot of workers in the fields while on my way here.

As I progressed through the town, heading towards the center, I noticed a group of children chatting under a nearby _sugi__(*)__,_ energetically discussing a subject.

One of these kids saw me as I walked by. To much of my dismay, his joyful face was immediately replaced by... _something_ else. I could roughly describe it as the face of someone that had just seen some outlaw walk in front of them.

The other kids were quick to copy him.

Was all of this because of Saber? Seeing how stealthy she was though, mere kids without any training shouldn't have been able to see her - it had to be something in relation to me.

_I don't remember being that unpopular. In fact, I even recall kids asking me to teach them how to hunt youkai before._

I ignored this detail and walked on to look for some food-stall or restaurant. Most of them were at the heart of the village, hence why I was headed towards the center.

A few more bystanders gave me suspicious glares as I walked by. One was a woman sitting under the veranda of her house, while the other was the village's old blacksmith, the latter taking a break outside of his workshop.

Perhaps there were more people that glared at me, but after seeing the first two, I just decided _to hell with it_, and kept going on while not paying any attention to the rest of the bystanders I walked by.

We arrived at the village's center. The place was much livelier than the earlier roads I had traveled along. Merchants lazily sat behind their stalls, shoppers marched around, inspecting the fruits and vegetables they wanted to buy, all while other villagers conversed carefreely. Not an unusual sight, since this was pretty much what I saw whenever I came here to stock up on supplies.

"Are you sure that this is a village? It looks more like a town to me," Saber said, still in her spirit form. "If you do not mind, I shall once again walk with the splendor of my body."

I didn't even have the time to answer. Immediately after the girl made her intentions clear, crimson tears began amassing together to form the Saber's body. In a flash of red light, she rematerialized before my very eyes.

"You could _at least_ have waited for an answer..."

"_Nay_, not experiencing the atmosphere of this village here would be greatly saddening!" Saber said enthusiastically, looking around her with a big smile of appreciation drawn on her lips. "This it an interesting settlement. It avoids the unbecomings of usual countryside architecture by mixing humbled buildings with beautifying decor."

Saber commented with the airs of a connoisseur. She seemed to be knowledgeable in architecture... but no matter how I looked at her, the girl didn't look like someone who could design a building to me.

_Whatever, we should get moving before my stomach complains any further._

"Let's go get some food," I said, beginning to make my way towards a _teriyaki_ stand that was quite close.

Saber _hmphed_ and responded:

"If that is your wish."

She took some time before following me. Rather than immediately trailing after me, she remained still for a while, continuously observing her surroundings with much interest. I couldn't help myself with being bothered about her – I guessed that she'd eventually catch up with me, so I went ahead.

I stepped in front of the food-stand. It was deserted, the owner being nowhere in sight. However, the _clatter_ and _clang_ sounds coming from the back made it clear that the owner was in fact here, albeit, at the rear of the stall, washing cutlery or whatever cooking utensils they were handling.

"Hello there?" I said.

The sounds stopped, and the curtain behind which the sounds were coming from was lifted up.

"_Lo' there_. _Ain't it the shrine maiden?_"

This person happened to be an acquaintance. It was very easy for me to recognize her, since not a lot of people spoke with the tomboyish tone she had. Also, no one had knee-length silver hair and ruby-colored eyes that always looked like they were perpetually on fire.

Last, but not least, no one managed to appear as bored either, even when having these eyes that were generally fit for individuals with most eccentric personalities.

"Fujiwara No Mokou? What are you doing here?" I asked.

This girl that appeared to be in her early twenties was a resident of the _Bamboo Forest of the Lost._ She had drunk the _Hourai Elixir_, so Mokou was not only immortal, but also a lot older than what her looks suggested. The villagers appreciated her since she often escorted the sick to _Eientei, Gensokyo's_ hospital, located inside the said _forest_ where she lived.

Do I have to add that, just like what its name implied, it was really easy to get lost in the _Bamboo Forest of the Lost_? That and the occasional youkai attack made it so that Mokou's escort was usually more than welcome - she wasn't just limited to taking an unmatched amount of beating; having lived for over a thousand years, she was quite the powerhouse with her fire magic.

Coming back to the situation though, seeing a usually secluded person selling _teriyaki_ brochettes in the village was quite a surprise for me.

"What'd you mean? Does this look like something else other than a _teriyaki_ stand to you?" Mokou said, slightly annoyed.

"Well, if you'll excuse me for being oblivious to that."

"Ey, no harsh feelings. It's just that it's the hundredth time I'm hearing that question today. So whatdya want?"

"You sell stuff other than _teriyaki_ brochettes here?"

Mokou didn't bother to answer. Rather, she bent down and reached for something, something which I eventually found out to be a chalkboard as she put it up on the counter.

...forms and strokes that _looked_ like Japanese were scribbled on there.

"That is some horrible handwriting," Saber said, walking up behind me.

_Okay, that was blunt. What the hell Saber?_

"Say what?" Mokou asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Wasn't that clear? I said that this was some horrible handwriting. Let me correct this for you, even the lowest of merchants should take care of their appearance!"

"Oi!"

Saber snatched the board. Having wiped out what was written with a swift motion, she began inscribing her own words with a piece of chalk. _Where_ she had even gotten that chalk, don't ask me.

"There," the girl in crimson declared with a smug smile, handing the board back to Mokou after not even five seconds had passed.

"This ain't-"

Mokou stopped once she laid her eyes onto the board. She was gobsmacked.

"-good..."

"You mean that it is, or you mean that it isn't?" I asked.

"It's good. Bloody good. Alright there little girl, I'll admit that you know how to draw," Mokou said, flashing a congratulating grin to Saber. Somehow I had already predicted that this was the last of things the Fujiwara girl should've done...

**Boom****.**

The ground shook below us. If it wasn't for me seeing Saber bring her foot down and causing such a remarkable tremor, I could have mistaken this for an earthquake. Even Mokou's stall began reverberating after Saber's stomp.

Condiments atop wooden racks were toppled, some rolling to their untimely fall and demise.

"What the..."

The aghast Mokou quickly turned around. Her face whitened as she saw what was going on behind her back... for her, that must had been one of these times where people see everything in slow-motion. That would help explain what ensued.

In a display of dexterity and hand to eye coordination that was more suited for a show performer than a _teriyaki_ stand owner, Mokou juggled and grabbed every single one of the falling containers. That was about five to six items being dropped from a height lower than six feet. Not something your everyday man could do.

"Hey there, 'you crazy?!" a shaken Mokou asked, her saves still in her hands.

"_I-am-not-a-little-girl. I am a grown woman,"_ Saber declared.

While the blonde girl retained a composed attitude that did not express irritation, the reddening cheeks and trembling lips were more than enough to figure out how Saber was feeling; if her punctuated speech wasn't enough already.

"S-S'cuse me there then, miss..." Mokou said weakly, still looking at Saber awkwardly. She put back the condiments in their original place and took hold of the board that she had dropped earlier. Having dusted it off Mokou placed it onto the stall's counter, turning it so that it faced the customers. "There ya go shrine maiden... a rowdy new friend, you got there."

I ignored her last comment to avoid getting dragged into more trouble. Instead, I chose to examine the board; finally getting to pick some food was a good prospect, but I was also curious to know what was it that Saber had written.

It then hit me that Mokou had said "_you know how to draw_" earlier, and not "_you know how to write_".

There was a _chalk-drawn teriyaki_ on the board, roughly filling three quarters of the available space. To its lower left, was the price tag. Saying that the drawing wasn't nice-looking would be a lie. Saber had even managed to nail down the _shading_, on the meat, all that in a chalk-based drawing, nonetheless.

_But wait, so there's only teriyaki? Or did Saber forget to put up the other stuff?_

"So there's really just one meal?"

"Don't ya remember what I said at the beginning?"

_This is the worst merchant I've ever come across._ If it wasn't for the fact that I was starving, I would've moved on to another spot by now.

"Alright, give me four of these brochettes," I said.

"Gonna eat em all by themselves? I s'pose that you're hungry, you don't look particularly in a good shape either."

There was something very important that I should have picked when Mokou spoke, but I was too busy thinking about my empty stomach to do so. I just watched as Mokou went and grabbed some meat from a recipient at the back of the stall. She then threw it onto the grill and began grilling the food.

The meat began to sizzle... it's flavor was smelling really good. But then, _anything_ smells good when you're hungry.

As the food was being cooked, I glanced to my side to see what Saber was up to. That was quite a show of force she had done earlier, and I couldn't afford any trouble running amok in the human village.

Saber was still a little bit red from that small incident, but it seemed like she had gotten over it. The girl in crimson just stood there, arms crossed, patiently waiting for me.

_...or is she waiting for the food as well?_

The realization that I hadn't bought anything for her came across to me as quite a shock... and quite some dread. I was supposedly her host – not giving her any food would be at best, extremely rude. However, I still didn't want to spend more than five hundred yen here; four brochettes was what I could afford at most from my savings.

_Fifty-fifty? _This idea, while probably the most appropriate, also happened to be the most heart-wrenching one for me. Two brochettes were _not_ going to satiate my hunger... but I was also aware though that I _owed_ my life to Saber - just sharing my food here wasn't going to pay back even a tenth of that debt.

Before I could ponder further though, I was distracted by the distinct laugh of kids approaching from the side.

"Miss Keine! I want some _teriyaki_ too!" a the voice of a young boy.

"Me too, me too!" another voice added, this one rather typical of a young girl's.

There was a group of children running about around a tall woman, the latter wearing a dark blue dress with white short sleeves. She didn't appear to mind the agitated kids around her, quite on the contrary, she was enjoying this display of liveliness.

She smiled cheerfully as the kids began tugging at her robe, repeating their requests.

"Ah, everyone, please calm down, I'll make sure that you all get a piece," the woman said before giving a small laugh.

The bunch was headed towards us. Concerning the woman, with her larger than life hat that resembled a pagoda, it was really hard not to recognize her - Kamishirasawa Keine was her name. She was a scholar and teacher at the Human Village's Temple School, and also, another acquaintance of mine. Like Mokou, she and I had met during the _corrupted full moon incident_.

The kids seemingly noticed me as they drew closer. Do you remember how all these people acted like when I walked by them earlier? Well, perhaps that you could guess what these kids reactions were...

...if you still can't, I suppose that I'll have to say that: just like how the other kids under the _sugi_ had reacted - they gave me fearful looks and hid behind Keine as if I was some kind of monster.

"_Have I done anything wrong as of late?"_ I began wondering, seeing that everyone I had come across until now had given me this crap. Well, all except Mokou, but the latter wasn't really a "normal" person.

"Miss Keine! I'm scared! Look at the shrine maiden!" one of the kids said, running to shelter himself from me behind the scholar.

Keine looked in the direction in which we were. I expected something like "oh, it's just the shrine maiden, no need to be scared," or something else to reassure the kids. She was the village's guardian after all, with nerves of steel... _and a head stronger than diamonds_.

Little did I know, that my expectations were going to fall_ oh so short_.

Keine's face went from curious to appalled the moment as she saw me. She stopped walking immediately, something that took the children by surprise as they all bumped into her back; as strong and sturdy as she was though, Keine was unaffected – the benefits of being a half-youkai.

"R-Reimu?!" Keine stuttered, still looking at me as if I was a ghost.

_You're confusing me with the person right next to me. _That_ one is a proper ghost._

Sadly, I didn't dare to express these thoughts vocally, not against a moral lecturer like Keine. Besides, I was too busy trying to figure out what was that thing about me that was so disturbing.

"Hello Keine. What's up?" I said dryly, waving to her.

"Yo Keine. S'up?" Mokou added, peeking out of the stall.

I really hoped that our _teriyaki_ weren't getting burnt as she did that.

The were-hakutaku remained silent and stared at us. The shock on her face only got bigger when she noticed Saber – it must've been the see-through dress.

Her reaction to all of this was... _loud._

"_**Don't you two what's up me; what the hell is the meaning of this?!"**_

Keine literally roared. My eardrums felt like they had been reduced to mush.

The amplitude of her voice attracted the attention from all the villagers around , temporarily.

These people were used to fights and random disputes breaking out, so the entire square fell into silence only for about three seconds, at the end of which, the villagers simply returned to their usual business and musings.

"Owie... why are you so worked up Keine? You're gonna drive away all the clients! Can't do fundraising if there ain't any of them," Mokou said while rushing out of the stall to meet Keine.

Keine suddenly left my list of priorities as I watched Mokou leave the stall.

_What's happening to the teriyaki?!_

I peeked over the stall and observed the four brochettes of meat.

They were already medium cooked... and that's how I liked my beef. If Mokou was going to leave them on the grill any longer, they'd eventually get over-grilled, maybe worse, _charred_.

I did what was the best for all of us – I took out the brochettes from the grill and began eating them.

The browned surface of the meat was tender, an utter delicacy to chew upon. Its taste was melting the insides of my mouth... it had been so long since _teriyaki_ had felt so pleasurable to consume.

"Are you committing larceny, shrine maiden?"

I jumped in shock from the suddenness of that question, its utterer sounding a bit too close for my liking.

I turned around and found out that, indeed, Saber was uncomfortably close to me – I could mostly see her face and olive eyes, the latter staring at me intently. What bothered me the most though was obviously, the way she had worded her question.

"I'm not a thief. I intend on paying this incompetent stall owner once she's back, but no way am I going to watch food being _wasted_."

Saber shot me an incredulous stare. She was beginning to annoy me.

"Whatever, here, have some of it too – you must be hungry as well, no?" I said, shoving one of the brochettes into her hands.

_My, this was less heart-wrenching than I'd expected._

"Oi, whatdya think you're doing?!"

That was Mokou. The Fujiwara girl had finally noticed what I was doing... took her long enough. The enthusiasm of seeing her good friend must have had overcome her good sense and awareness.

"Does it look like I'm doing something else other than eating?" I questioned back flatly.

_Heh, How do you like that?_

"See Keine? Told ya that you're worrying for nothing. Look, she's totally fine and being as annoying as ever," Mokou said, addressing the scholar that was now by her side.

"That's not the point, how can you be so indifferent to such details!?"

Keine was rebuking Mokou quite hard. Why it had come to this, I had no clue. Well, I could actually fathom that somehow, there was something with me that Mokou was seeing as casual, but on the other hand, Keine wasn't sharing her opinion.

"What details, exactly?" I asked.

"Reimu!" Keine exclaimed, walking up to me. "What happened to you, and who's that blonde girl?!"

"What happened to me? Nothing, just buying some _teriyaki_ from Mokou. You fundraising, I hear?" I said, avoiding the subject about the shrine. Suspiciously, Keine appeared to be wary of it, or at the very least, wary of the events I had gone through before coming here.

"Stop playing dumb with me!" Keine pointed her finger at my chest. "What's with all this blood?!"

Blood. _Blood_.

I suddenly felt very stupid as I understood what Keine meant - I hadn't washed away the mess on my clothes. If I wanted no one to ask me questions in the first place,_ why was I walking in the human village with a blood-soaked shirt?_

There were some times when I got a bit ruffled after spellcard fights, but I never recall of a time when I walked into the village with blood all over. This certainly explained why the villagers and children gave me all those sinister stares whenever I walked by them earlier.

I imperatively had to find a way to cover this blunder.

"Ah, I was cooking some stuff and slipped..." _...think, Reimu, think!_ "...on tomatoes."

"This smells like _blood_ to me, not tomatoes."

Right. I had forgotten that Keine happened to be quite beastly in some of her senses. Being a _were-hakutaku_, she naturally had a repertoire of heightened senses, including very sharp eyesight, sensitive hearing, and a nose that could easily pick up a scent from a kilometer away. I wasn't going to get away with that excuse.

I tried searching for something else, but the words weren't coming.

"Who did this to you? Did you get in a fight with one of the greater youkai?" Keine asked.

She was really pushing on the matter, and this was becoming most irritating, especially as I couldn't solve this case with the typical _ofuda_ to the face. Falsifying my earlier claim, a crowd was beginning to gather around, and blowing away Keine in front of them could be a problem, seeing that she was acknowledged as the village's guardian.

As I was locked in this troublesome situation, Saber, out of all people, had to add her personal opinion.

"Wouldn't it be good if you told them what happened at your shrine? I trust that the inhabitants here visit it on a regular basis, so don't you think that they'd be more than happy to assist in reclaiming what you've lost?" the girl in crimson inquired.

Once again, she left me no time to answer – Saber went straight to the middle of the circle that the crowd had formed while piling around us. Standing in an ennobled posture, she began giving a theatrical speech:

"Men and women, inhabitants of this settlement, behold this martyr here before you, your beloved Shrine Maiden! She has suffered great injustice on this day, having been chased out of her domain, being nearly murdered in the process! You who have pure hearts and righteous souls, why not come and assist her in reclaiming what is righteously hers?"

I should have jumped on her and muffled her right from the beginning, but something about Saber's speech had me remain put until she was done speaking. _Charisma_? Could it really be that this petite girl had the domineering aura of one that rules over people? Was this the one that had called herself a servant beforehand?

Things about her were making less and less sense. A ghost-like entity that had a human physiology, claiming to be a servant, and yet, displaying characteristic usually found on rulers of legends. While in Gensokyo, meeting emperors wasn't something customary, I did have my fair share of knowledge about the stories of the Japan's Emperors, and also, some other countries' rulers. A _miko_ not knowing about folklore and history was a ridiculous _miko_, at any rate.

In regards to this, I had a general idea of how people of high status were supposed to conduct themselves, and I could see that Saber had that exact flair to her.

_But her babbling, no matter how eloquent, was also too much._ I had to silence her. She hadn't even finished speaking yet, and the crowd had already been aroused, the women and men all gossiping between themselves about my fate.

"It is-"

I jumped on Saber and put my hand in front of her mouth, preventing her from further uttering any more words. I gave up on being transparent and figured out that once I had kicked out these idiots from my shrine, I'd just come back and tell everyone that the incident was solved, so it was better if we would get going.

There were two things that could've happened once I decided to act like that. Keine could have gotten all nuts about the safety of the Hakurei Shrine Maiden being compromised and sequestrated me for further questioning; or the villagers could have been thrown into a chaotic panic as they realized that someone else had taken custody of the Hakurei Border's focal control point.

Yes, I hadn't mentioned it earlier, but the Hakurei Shrine was the epicenter of the Hakurei Barrier – if someone was versed enough in magic and had taken control of the shrine, they could mess around freely with it. Well, not all of the villagers knew this though. Maybe some of the elder ones, but not everyone was privy to that knowledge, since as far as I was aware – only the high-ranking and older individuals in Gensokyo knew of the more... _intricate_ details that concerned the _Hakurei Border_.

I tried to speak and cut off any incoming panic... but to my ungainly surprise, before I could even say something, I felt something surge through my body as I held Saber. The entire world around us became blur, and I was thrown into darkness.

_I hate darkness._

Light came back eventually, like the sun slowly rising from the horizon, and everything was slowly revealed to me. I wondered what was the meaning of all this. _What had happened? Did Saber cast a spell on me?_

I looked around. As I saw my surroundings, I was inclined to believe that there definitely was something wrong – I was no more in the Human Village.

I stood in the middle of a completely different city, both in scale and looks. Everything here was built of a white and finely sculpted marble. There was a constant feel of glory to the entire place, as if even the buildings were puffing themselves up in pride. Yes, pride, I could see pride everywhere I looked.

The square in which I stood was totally empty. Or was it the square where my _mind_ stood?

_It's a vision._

I barely had the time to further catch a glimpse of my surroundings when people began appearing out of the empty air, quickly filling the square in hundreds. They all wore weird tunics that I had never seen before, and they didn't appear to be from Asia either. Rather, their ethnic roots resembled those of those that came from the west.

These people didn't even notice that I was there. They just spoke in-between themselves in a language that I could not understand. They continued speaking seemingly agitated towards some oncoming event. I could only remain still and watch on, unable to comprehend what exactly they were discussing about.

It lasted until a trumpet resounded, which is when everyone fell silent. All of the crowd turned to face something at my back.

I quickly followed suit, wanting to see what all of this was about.

Climbing the stairs that led onto a large podium, rose a person. It was the one that I had come to know as Saber. I could recognize her from her ever short stature and the ever dignified, elegant face that she had.

Saber was wearing an entirely different outfit compared to what I had seen before – her head was adorned with a crown made of leaves, quite simple, but fitting very well with her clothing, giving off a more regal look. Speaking of her clothing, it was a lot lighter than what I had seen her wear previously: on her torso, she had a rather skimpy sleeveless shirt, adorned with elegant fabric and golden linings, the said linings more elaborate than the ones I had seen on her dress. Also, wrapped around her waist, Saber had a long crimson cloth with even more golden linings on it, forming some sort sort of elaborate crest.

Red and gold, _red and gold_. I had never seen clothes like this before, nor had I been exposed significantly to other cultures, but when confronted with such a sight, all I could tell myself was: "_this is the appearance of a ruler, no more, no less"._

Saber raised her hand and saluted the crowd, and the men and women amidst whom I stood immediately began cheering her with an incredible enthusiasm.

It was incredible, I could feel that some of these people around me were more than respecting her, they were _worshiping_ her.

Saber took an ennobled pose - the same one that she had done when she addressed the people of the village. She opened her mouth to speak, appearing as confident and proud as ever... however, before I could hear anything, the blur and darkness returned, and the the entire world shifted to red.

Yes, all of the world's colors turned to red. Flames sprouted everywhere.

I heard the terrified screams of women and children. Some people were on fire, desperately trying to fend off the consuming flames that were slowly burning them.

I was given a very _chilling_ reminder of what the old hell looked like.

This was all through a brief vision though, as, per chance, the darkness returned to spirit me away from this inferno. It was a good thing, I was getting creeped out.

_Or maybe that it wasn't so good._

The darkness faded away again after having lasted for some seconds.

The city of tainted red marble had been replaced by trees and nature, resembling the flora typical of Gensokyo.

But it was a Gensokyo tainted in red. A bloodied red. This place... I recognized it - it was the woods near the shrine.

The moment I realized that, a horrible, unbearable, putrid stench began filling my nose.

As my eyes went down to look at the ground before me, I saw a mass of things that I did not understand at first. Maybe it was rather that I did not _want_ to understand what these were, but at any rate, I couldn't lie to myself for long.

That stench, it came from _decomposing_ bodies. Creatures being stripped from their life-force, their skin slowly turning into a _mucous, yucky texture_ that I couldn't even have imagined in my greatest of nightmares.

I wanted to puke. I wanted to vomit everything that I had inside, so great was this abomination that I was being subjected to.

"_H...h...he...lp..."_ the decomposing corpses muttered.

This wasn't even a nightmare anymore, there were no words to describe the amount of horror contained within this vision.

I wanted this to end.

I wanted this to end so badly.

_S-someone, get me out of here!_

I was at my limit, I really felt like throwing up everything inside me.

Luckily, God heard my request. The darkness returned once more, just in time, as my mind threw up everything. I hoped that this wasn't translating to my real world body... I really hoped that it wasn't going to do so back in the real world.

In a brief flash, I was brought back to the Human Village, in the middle of the crowd. But against all my hopes, I wasn't holding on to Saber, I wasn't standing and trying to muffle that girl in red.

Instead, I was on my knees, staring at a pool of vomit. Probably my own.

"_H...h...he...lp..._"

The voices that should have been gone... they still lingered on inside my head.

Saber, Mokou and Keine were crouching down next to me, their faces filled with worry. They were trying to speak to me - I saw their mouth moving, I saw them articulating words. Even some villagers had gathered around me, looking on with horror while talking to each other.

But I couldn't hear a single thing; all that I heard was the anguished cries that kept repeating_ on and on_ _and on_:

"_H...h...he...lp..._"

I had to go. There was no time to lose. My instincts told me that something horrible was happening at the shrine. I had to put an end to this madness.

"Saber, I'm taking us to the shrine."

This time, I was the one that didn't leave her time to respond. I just grabbed her hand and dragged her behind me me as I blasted off, flying towards home.

I knew that the Hakurei Border could be manipulated with ease from my home, but as far as I was concerned, who would have an interest in doing so? No party that I knew of; but I didn't know everything nor everyone in Gensokyo – I had been taking things for granted, and what I had just seen reinforced the point that whoever was at my shrine, they weren't up planning to do anything good

There was an unspoken horror that was under way at the Hakurei Shine, and I simply couldn't let that slip. I initially thought that this would simple be a standard incident resolving, that I would simply have to return to the shrine and kick the intruders out, but things were becoming worse and worse..

_I have to hurry there before it was too late._

"W-wait there! Argh, Mokou, please take care of the kids and give them some _teriyaki_, I'm tracking down Reimu!" I heard Keine shout behind me.

_Such a persistent woman._

**Phantasm 1.2 - END**


	5. Phantasm 1,3

**Author's Note:**

And so I return from inactivity, or rather, from my large amount of unannounced work.

Now, there are many things for me to say, and if you did happen to somewhat peek at this thread in the past day, you'd notice that there were edits being fired left and right... why do you wonder?

Simple, I've gone through a third (definite, very definite) final revision of this entire fan-fic. I've addressed quite a few problems that my reviewers pointed out, so here's here's a an outline of the major changes that I did in this re-writing.

- PoV jerking around has been removed; you will mostly stay on 1 Character per "arc", except for some other times where I'm going to copy Nasu...  
- The present tense is no more. After a discussion with one of my Betas, I found out that I write surprisingly better in the past tense.  
- The order of things, and the big problem that Reimu's trouble happened to be off-screen (sacrificed for Zelretch and Yukari awesomeness), was addressed.

At any rate, now that I look at this work, I can proudly say that... "I've come a long way since I first posted this Fan-Fic." To point out the main thing that hasn't changed though:

**_- THE PLOT_**

Still the good old same one.

Have a nice read

* * *

**Phantasm 1.3: Red Hell **

A few years ago, _Gensokyo's _sky was covered with a thick scarlet mist. All sunlight was blotted out as it covered the entirety of the land, turning the radiant day into a crimson night.

The sun unable any longer to shower its rays of life upon the earth, plants began withering, crops began to stagnate, unable to grow, and the health of living creatures was quickly going down the drain. Worst of all, while humans were hit hard, the _youkai_ actually benefitted from this disturbance, due to their natural affinity to darkness. Their times of activity doubled, perhaps even tripled for some.

The balance of the land was in danger - I had to intervene.

I still remember it like it was yesterday. That incident was after all, the first one where the _spellcards_ system was used.

_Spellcards_ were in essence, a process that equalized the difference in power between every individual. It was an arrangement to ensure that humans and youkai fought on an even ground, and also, to guarantee the safety of both sides the conflict had come to an end.

The _spellcards _rules in question, were written by me... well, part of them - someone else had already laid the foundations beforehand - it was just a piece of paper that I happened to come across one day.

What mattered at any rate, was that all of _Gensokyo_ accepted it warmly. Weirdly, even those that should not have even heard of it began employing it as a means to resolve their disputes, see for example: the residents of the _old hell, _and people that had just come from the _outer world_, like the _Moriya Shrine's_ inhabitants.

Was it the popularity that my creation gained, or was it the doing of someone else that was involved in all this? I never really bothered figuring out all of this - Gensokyo was a land where the adjective "unexplainable" could apply to about 99% of its content.

In the end though, that _spellcards_ became popular, or that its founding parchment had already been prepared well before I got my hands on it - both weren't too important questions when compared to that one mystery:

_Who made it so that the spellcards system could become a reality?_

I never did any large scale incantation to transform lethal projectiles into harmless fireworks, nor did I ever change things so that during _spellcard_ battles, wounds inflicted physically, even mortal ones, would result in nothing more than a scratch.

_All of it just happened. Who was the one responsible for all this?_

This also, I never really asked myself - it just got lost within all of the adventures I embarked on from that point. I suppose that I began taking it all for granted, seeing the convenience in all of this - I could go about beating up people that were causing trouble, without fear of killing anyone, and peaceful resolutions would always come to happen in the end.

It was like a dream come true.

Now, though, there was a valid reason for me to question all these things once again, seeing that the _spellcards'_ rules had been broken... _and out of all people to break it on, it was me._

I overflew the abandoned path leading to my shrine. Saber hung on to me in her spirit form, having reverted to it after we blasted off from the Human Village moments earlier.

"Shrine maiden... what happened?" Saber asked.

I was unsure what to answer her. Saying that I saw a vision of what her life was like would have been most uncouth. Besides, the said vision was in itself a bizarre one – it appeared to date from an epoch way before the one of the current _outside world_. The city, the architecture, the clothing of the people, they all didn't fit with the description of the _outside world_ that Yukari had given me.

I was left rather confused, so I decided not to tell Saber about this. Still, I couldn't avoid explaining the reason why we took off so abruptly, so I figured that I'd at least inform her about it:

"I had a premonition that something wrong is going on at the shrine."

"Premonition, you say?"

"Yeah, I often get these when my instincts try to warn me of the trouble to come."

Although I said instincts, it was more like a voice from the inside of my head that kept telling me what to do. In a similar way to my effortless flight ability, this "voice" had been stuck inside me as long as I could remember, internally guiding me at all times, may it be in battle, or even in my usual life.

I was a bit fearful that Saber was going to answer me with a weirded out tone. Talking about this matter to others often made them wonder if I was crazy, or possessed by a spirit. No one never really took me seriously when I told them about this "voice", the only two exceptions being Marisa and Yukari.

But then, with the first's personality and the latter's prankful nature, it was hard to in return to take them back with equal earnestness as well.

However, Saber didn't sound incredulous or doubting at all when she answered - she just _hmphed_ acknowledgingly and said:

"Let us trust in them then. You will have some clearing up to do with the villagers though."

I didn't have to see her face to know if she was hiding anything. The answer was immediate, brief, and sounded genuine. It didn't seem like she was hiding anything or having hidden thoughts behind these words.

This made me feel better. She did not dismiss me as some sort of crazy girl. But then, _she happened to be crazy_ as well in some respects... but at any rate, that was a lot of faith that she was putting in me, I who was someone she had just met, and somehow... it felt really nice.

"Yeah, no need to tell me about that."

"Was it the food that was poisoned, or was it just your body acting up?"

"You mean when I threw up?"

"Obviously," Saber said bluntly.

I didn't want to describe what had just traumatized me to Saber. At any rate, I had that bad feeling that we were going to see it soon.

"What I saw... was horrible."

Saber didn't answer, but seeing the mass of crimson particles move a bit, I guessed that it was probably something like a nod that she was giving me.

"Reimu! Wait, Reimu!" a voice cried from behind.

_Oh sigh, I nearly forgot that we had her behind us._

Keine had managed to catch up. I decided to explain the situation, since the _were-hakutaku_ was often quick to lose her temper, and I had no intention of getting headbutted as a result of that outcome.

I halted my flight, and Keine stopped right next to me, her waist-length blue-silver hair fluttering in the wind.

"Reimu! _What on earth is going on_!? First, you show up in the village soaked in blood, second, you space out and throw up, then. last but not least, you run away without any warning. Tell me, what is the problem?!"

Keine's tone was annoying, just like the one of a preaching adult. But then... she actually was a teacher, so it was kinda natural for her to sound like that.

I could understand a bit why the scholar was being so persistent - my welfare was tied to the Human Village's; if anything bad ever happened to me, the Human Village would quickly fall in turmoil as an aftermath of it.

"Keine, I'll make this short - first of all, I got kicked out of the shrine, and nearly killed as well in the process. Second, this girl here currently in her spiritual form is called Saber, and she's the one that treated me. I also think that Yukari has something to do with all this, but it's not clear yet what she's exactly trying to achieve. Last, I had a premonition that something horrific is happening at the shrine, so let's get moving."

I turned around immediately and resumed my flight.

"W-wait, Reimu!"

_Argh, does she even speak Japanese or what?_

"What is it?!" I asked Keine, not stopping, but rather, just turning my head to address her as she flew behind me.

"You mean that someone else is in control of the shrine now?"

"If I got kicked out, what else would that mean to you?!"

Keine took this a bit hardly. Anyway, that was enough to silence her, and that was exactly what I needed – some quietness. Seeing how tense my nerves had become, following such a series of _unpleasant_ experiences... I could use a moment or two of respite.

Right as I was about to close my eyes and take a deep breath though, I noticed something on the horizon that was rather alarming.

You know what you think of immediately when you see a bunch of white patches in the sky, right? _Oh, it's just clouds_, or something fairly close to that train of thought, isn't it?

Well, that was exactly what I dismissed those weird white things floating above my shrine as - until I noticed how weirdly shaped they were. These "clouds" snaked from the shrine to other places, and in fact, when I inspected them closer, I understood that these were in truth, long trails of _od_ that was being siphoned from all over the place.

I wasn't the only one to have realized that by that point.

"Trouble stirs ahead... that is a sizable amount of _prana _being stored," Saber commented, still in her spiritual form.

Keine didn't take long as well to notice as well, seeing that two of us already had our attention on that strange sight.

"With such a quantity of _od_ being hoarded, whoever took the shrine can't possibly be planning anything good... this is outrageous! Just what on earth are those guys thinking?!"

_If only I knew, if only I knew._

The shrine was about minute of flight away now. I could see the hill on which it had been built, and also, the very long stairway leading up to the shrine's entrance was now visible as a long white stripe.

The atmosphere was strange though. The color of the sky had become dimmer, as If night was already approaching. There was a tint of purple and red to the air, somewhat similar to the one given by Remilia's _Scarlet Mist_.

However, to my consternation, there wasn't any cloud or mist in the sky blocking the sun – the latter was fading away, _just like that_.

Needless to say, the feeling of ominous dread that had begun to creep inside me due to the nightmarish vision of earlier, wasn't getting any better at all.

"Reimu? Is it my sensitive eyesight that's playing tricks on me, or is it really getting darker?" Keine asked, she also having noticed how weird the place was becoming.

"It is getting darker and I don't know-"

_Stop._

The world turned to red.

"_What the..."_

A deep red.

It wasn't the Scarlet's Devil's whimsical red. It was a malevolent red, a tint that screamed a big huge _evil_ to the eyes seeing it.

The trees, the grass, the soil, the sky, everything around us that made up _Gensokyo_'s flora was tainted red, as if a rain of blood had come to pass, and nature had drunk it all up.

Azalea leaves drenched in blood, oaks and pines that looked as if they had siphoned all of the blood from corpses buried beneath them... I could go on and on about how every single thing in sight looked as if it had been bloodied.

"_What on earth is this?"_

"A bounded field, shrine maiden, a particularly disgusting one," Saber said, still hanging on to me as a spread of particles. "You should go down, it seems to go up in intensity as we heighten our altitude."

"... Saber's right, It looks like this red '_thing_' gets thicker at greater heights," Keine added urgently.

My instincts weren't going against these opinions at any rate. On the contrary, they were agreeing with them.

Coming to think of it, their was that weird, uncomfortable sensation that someone was literally squeezing my heart. In fact, I was even having some trouble breathing, my lungs struggling to inhale vital oxygen in.

We all dove down towards the path which we overflew. As Keine and Saber said, the effect lightened up as we touched down onto the ground.

Saber took form. I wasn't able to enjoy the beauty of that scene this time though, as standing in the middle of this bloody environment was even worse than flying over it. Still, that didn't prevent me from seeing that when Saber materialized, she didn't bring her body alone this time:

She held a massive jagged sword in her hands. The weapon was as long, if not, longer than her own body, the blade looking even more menacing than the _shinigami_'s scythe.

"Shrine maiden, Scholar, I suggest that we proceed on foot from here - I cannot partake in aerial combat, and besides, this field was made to suck out of the lift of anything that flies; we'd be putting ourselves at a disadvantage if we were to travel through it." Saber said, holding her sword with one hand, resting the blunt side of the blade onto her shoulder.

There were other things to worry about - but I just couldn't stop staring at Saber, and on top of that, I couldn't keep a straight face while doing it. A small person holding such a big sword went from the realm of awe-inspiring to the one of the exceedingly silly - it was just absurd.

Keine, on the other hand, wasn't that distracted. As expected of the Guardian of the Humans, she remained level-headed and cool in such situation, and spoke up.

"I concur with your friend, Reimu. That aura will drain us dry of strength if we go through it," the were-hakutaku said.

"_Hey, since when are we friends?"_ would be what I would've protested, but it wasn't the time for that, so I instead plainly nodded to show my approval of the plan.

This wasn't really my style though. My personal way of resolving this would have been to create a field of my own, and then, under its protection, fly straight to the shrine while negating the enemy field's effects. Boundaries were my specialty after all.

But moving in group was wiser here, I reckoned. I also wasn't in a particularly good shape, and tiring myself further wouldn't be of much help - it did require investment and effort to make bounded fields, at any rate. The one at the shrine could afford so, seeing all of their doings, and the fact that my home itself was the focal point of many leylines.

"Let's get going," I told the other two, leading the way by hovering away a meter or so above the ground.

My chest was feeling heavy, all this commotion had stirred up that dormant wound.

However, I just went on, trying to pay no heed to it. It hurt, and it was annoying, but as a shrine maiden, and as a _youkai hunter_, letting such a trivial annoyance slow me down was most unbecoming of me.

_No matter how much I steel myself, this red forest is creeping me out._

I might have gone down to the _old hell_, or even travelled into the depths of _Makai_... _maybe_, I don't exactly recall doing so for the latter. Well, no matter where I went before, I had never felt such a... vicious atmosphere. I have heard the wails of thousands of _vengeful spirits_ echo in the background. as I fought an insane _hell raven_; I caught a glimpse of death itself and nearly died when I battled against the rampant Lady of the _Netherworld_; I was brought eye to eye with madness and immortals as I set out to solve _the corrupted full moon_ incident...

… but never did something creep me out like that.

What exactly was the viciousness here that I am speaking of, you wonder? Why was this red taint so disturbing, while I had been in a similar setting before, namely, during Remilia's_Scarlet Mist_?

Allow me to explain. You see, Remilia's red evoked whimsicalness. Sure, it turned the world into a vampire's favorite colours, black and red, which to be fair, weren't very inspiring when it came to feeling safe - however, it was harmful for Gensokyo in the long run, I felt that its actual purpose, the reason that fuelled it, was whimsicality. It had no intent to harm in it, neither did it have any sort of negative connotation.

The goal of that mist, was not to destroy.

What I was seeing now, evoked something totally different. It was a barbarian sentiment, one of utter waste that disregarded the preservation of life in all of its forms, may it be plants, humans, animals, or _youkai_. It was sapping the life out of everything, caring for nothing at all.

The group composed of Keine, Saber and myself went on through this revulsing scene, not saying much to each other. The air was tense, and an environment like this wasn't exactly the one someone would choose to have a chat at any rate.

I hovered a meter above the path, with Keine following right behind me. As for Saber... she was keeping up with us by running at an incredible speed.

_And she wasn't even breaking a sweat._

Compared to her, I wasn't such a nice day.

I found that the breathing problem had returned, and alongside it also came the hellacious feeling that my heart was having all of its life squeezed out.

The bounded field, while not as strong as in the area above our heads, was still getting more intense as we drew closer to the shrine.

"_That is enough torture,"_ I thought to myself, clenching my fist onto my weary heart_._

I decided that the time to use my abilities had come - going through this ordeal would only be worth the bother if it was less straining than flying straight to the shrine - and this wasn't looking like it'd be the case here.

"Everyone, hang on a sec - I'm going to set up a barrier to counteract this bounded field," I said, taking out four _ofuda _talismans from my sleeve, then, landing onto the ground.

"Of course, do so with haste. My _Magic Resistance_ sadly isn't the greatest, so any sort of support would help," Saber said.

_Magic Resistance? She is resistant to magic?_

Saber's statement had me raise an eyebrow - but then I recalled that she wasn't a human. In the end, that she claimed to have properties characteristic of a greater youkai wasn't such a weird thing.

"Why didn't you do that from the beginning?" Keine asked.

"Duh, because there was no need. I didn't expect the field to become as powerful as that."

With that said, I focussed my attention on the four pieces of ofuda that I held. I put each of them down on the ground, carefully setting three of them in a triangle-like fashion, then inserting the fourth final one in the middle of it all.

Each of them began glowing as I mentally prepared myself for the incantation.

"_Hachiman protect us,_

_Sarutahiko guide us,_

_Amaterasu shine on us._

_Oh Gods, weave around us,_

_A shield through which none can harm us!_"

At least my training to summon gods would have an actual use other than serving Yukari's plans back then when we went onto the moon.

Energy coursed through the three ofuda surrounding the fourth lone one. This meant that the three gods had accepted my request, and it was now my turn to input enough energy, so that the spell could actually work.

I kneeled down and pressed two of my fingers against the middle charm - _od_ flew from my body to the piece of paper.

Now, before I continue, allow me to enlighten you on a subject - the complexity of spells. In most cases, it determines the winner in clashes of magecraft. There are many ways to make a spell more complex, such as creating a more focussed, longer incantation.

That's not the only method though, as the amount of existing processes to enhance a spell's complexity, are as numerous as the ways rice can be consumed._Sake, sushi, fried_... wait, nevermind what I just said...

At any rate, I tried a barrier with a complexity of the first level.

It didn't stand for long. Barely had I constructed the foundations when everything caved in, and the red hell quickly made its return to torture us.

I upped my efforts and went on two a second level of complexity.

It stood this time, but it couldn't properly keep the offending bounded field from seeping in.

_This is getting annoying... and tiring_.

I frustratedly went to the third level of complexity... and this time to my contentment, I felt the flow of od stabilize at a hundred percent. The barrier finally managed to remain up and do its job effectively.

A square of _od _threaded itself around us, representing the three gods' blessings that took material form. Soon after, the red taint slowly receded as the bounded field I formed pushed the enemy's back.

"That is impressive, did you manage to dispel the bounded field as a whole?" Saber asked, looking at the newly formed barrier with interest.

"No, that'd be impossible, the scale of this opposing field is too big."

Indeed, while I did have my own qualities as a shrine maiden, I wasn't going to match the output of the bounded field that was trying to crush us. Whoever was responsible for it was hoarding _od_ at the shrine, and seeing how the _Hakurei Shrine_ already was a massive center for many of Gensokyo's leylines... not a lot of people in the land would have been able to go up against such power.

"That's the actual first time that I'm seeing you summon gods. So you're not just all show, aren't you?" Keine asked, her lips curled up in a wry smile.

_Of course not you idiot, who got beaten badly a year or two ago?_

We could once again see normal colours all around us. However, the lighting didn't exactly return to normal - it still appeared as if dusk was settling in, even though we should've been right in the middle of the day.

I grabbed the middle ofuda that had been infused with power and let it go afloat - using items like these to keep up active spells, was much more convenient than constantly maintaining the latter with my own _od _reserves.

The talisman hovered ahead and guided the way for us. It was a job that I had given it, at any rate.

"Come on, let's follow it," I said to the other two.

"Huh? Have you imbedded some sort of pathfinding spell into this _mystic code_? Saber asked.

_Mystic Code_... wasn't that the term she first used when she referred to my ofuda talismans? Her jargon sure was strange, I thought.

"Something like that. That Mystic Code you're referring to, it's my ofuda, isn't it?"

"That piece of paper that you use as a catalyst for your mantras." Saber said, pointing at the ofuda that was now floating ahead of us.

"I guessed so. Well, at any rate, the blessings of _Hachiman_, the God Protector of Japan, are the actual ones generating this field around us.

_Sarutahiko_, the god of wisdom and guidance and _Amaterasu_, the great goddess of the Japanese pantheon, were added to my mantra respectively to give this charm the ability to "feel" what road was best for us, and to reinforce the chant in general.

Having the patroness of the pantheon support you is always a good thing, don't you think?"

"Anyway, we don't have the time to explain such things -save them for later," Keine said, cutting us off. "We should better get going - your charm's trying to bring us somewhere."

The scholar was probably right; even though it was just an object, the charm appeared to be urging us to follow it, bouncing up and down as if to show its impatient nature.

Without any further ado, we went after it. Strangely, it didn't continue following the beaten path - rather, it lead us into the forest.

"You sure that you got the spell right?" Keine asked as we pushed aside the leaves and branches, wading through the thick shrubbery.

Her doubtful attitude was becoming quite bothersome.

"Look, why did you tag along us in the first place, if you are going to second guess everything that I do? Who solved all of the incidents that happened during the past months and years, mind you?"

"No need to be that reproachful... I was just wondering why your charm is having us go a way off from the Shrine's direction," Keine irked, getting defensive.

"Go ask the gods that decided to help us -"

Saber suddenly walked in between the two of us, planting her sword into the ground.

"Be at ease you two, there is no time for us to quarrel. Besides, if we continue this needless dispute, we'll be left behind by the guiding charm."

I diverted my attention from Keine for a bit, and saw that the charm was indeed going off on its own without us.

"_The heck is that thing's problem?_" I muttered, begrudgingly running after it.

As I went after the charm, Keine and Saber quick to follow. I wished that I could actually fly after it, but to try to fly in this forest's thick foliage, was to invite myself to slam my face into a branch.

**Interlude : Witch of Colchis**

_The Hakurei Shrine, central worship area._

The figure wrapped in a black and purple cloak bit her lip, warily observing the image of the shrine maiden and her friends, running through the forest. The crystal globe that floated between her hands allowed her to monitor all the activity within the shrine's vicinity.

The group was headed towards one of these small "pockets" that had been stubbornly resisting her bounded field, so it did not really bode well for the _witch_'s plans, for _Caster._

There had already been one intruder which was interfering, and now, these other annoyances had just added themselves on the list of impediments.

The _Witch of Colchis_ was less than pleased, especially when she recognized the shrine maiden as the one _Assassin_ had been unable to dispatch earlier this night.

"_Useless, an utterly useless Servant,_" she scornfully muttered, thinking about the samurai that, in all his fortune, was far away from her, standing at the Shrine's gates and guarding the top of the stairway.

Caster wanted to go out and personally punish him, perhaps even dispose of him, but she couldn't afford doing so – the enemies that were on their way here were not to be underestimated. This Shrine Maiden here, while easily incapacitated with a sneak attack, proved to be more than a threat when actually given a chance to fight back. She had after all, found a way to easily nullify her _Age of Gods_-level bounded field. It was on a local scale nonetheless, but still, no modern _magi _would have been able to achieve such a result.

The witch reasoned, that expecting the people of this land to be on the same level as the _magi_ that she had encountered before, would be a very unsafe decision. This strongly echoed in her mind as she shot a glimpse at her back, looking at the pile of _things_ that she had made nearby the shrine's main altar.

_Youkai _and _fairies_ lay atop each other, nearly lifeless, whimpering in pain and despair as they were having all of their life force sucked out of them.

Caster had rounded them up after she unleashed her bounded field's initial wave, its intensity powerful enough to make sure that no one could then escape and warn others of what was happening - the opening salvo was made to floor everyone, no, _everything_.

Things hadn't gone as well as the witch had wished though. She went through some trouble though while trying to subdue the entourage and turn them into reliable sources of prana. While these _phantasmal beasts_ were weakened badly by her bounded field, a copy of the "_Blood Fort Andromeda_" she had managed to replicate and improve from _Rider's _arsenal, the creatures weren't left totally defenseless post the initial shock – their magic resistance was strong, perhaps not as strong as a servant of the _Saber_ class, but what would have turned humans immediately into mush, these creatures took it without too much damage.

Caster had already taken care of the subduing though, so there wasn't much to worry about anymore. Also, at any rate, the toughness of theses _phantasmal beasts_ was in the end very practical for her as they proved to be very durable when improvised as prana generators. And that wasn't the thing attribute that she could exploit - the weaker phantasmal beasts also had other uses, being easily mind controllable, and thus, easily usable as an end to reinforce her current stronghold.

But though she had meticulously set up these preparations... it wasn't like she was planning on staying in this place much longer – her true goal was to reunite with her beloved man, with the one that she had been separated from. Kuzuki Souichirou, the one that she loved, the one that had a given a reason for her to exist.

The _witch_ was working hard to find a way in returning to him, and to her satisfaction, things were going rather well.

Caster had thoroughly ransacked the shrine for information. There were many scrolls and manuscripts that piqued her interest, all of them describing eastern magecraft with a great deal of detail. Even though they were written in a language foreign to her, a difference of medium wasn't that great of a setback for Caster, she who had flawlessly mastered _High Speed Divine Words_. Besides, as a Servant summoned by the Fuyuki Grail, she was naturally given the ability to decipher Japanese.

Some of these scrolls had already been put to use - her very own bounded field had been reinforced by the magical theories deciphered from the latter. Unlike the research of the so called "_Magus Association_" these written artifacts here actually held knowledge of value.

But most important to her was the data that they contained, the data about "where" she had been transported exactly. It appeared to be some sort of land separated from _Gaia _by a very powerful barrier. The details to break said barrier had not been elaborated upon, but the _Witch of Colchis_ had, nonetheless, come up with a method that was apparently working, seeing that she could witness the slow deconstruction of the barrier outside the walls of this shrine in which she stood.

Even the night from the other side was seeping in.

Caster did not know who brought her to this land, and neither was she certain that her current endeavors would allow her to return to Kuzuki's side. After all, there was no guarantee that on the other side of this barrier, was the _RyuudouTemple_, the place where she had come from.

_But was there anything else she could do?_

Caster looked at the crystal ball again, her attention focusing on the blonde crimson figure that accompanied the shrine maiden. Caster had seen that face of hers before, during the Holy Grail War from which the witch came... it was the face of that war's Saber, the trump card that she sought so dearly to defeat _Berserker_.

The Saber here though, was a different person altogether. Perhaps that these two shared a physical resemblance, but Caster could tell that the two girls were in fact, two separate souls.

"Where did she come from?" Caster wondered as she looked at the petite figure, leaping like a gazelle amongst the trees.

The shrine maiden didn't appear to hold any command seals, nor did the other woman in blue that traveled with the group. It was an uncommon and strange sight to Caster, seeing that a Servant was traveling without a Master.

But wherever the Master was, that wasn't the problem – Caster decided that she wasn't going to leave this place empty handed.

"_Why not return to my own grail war, with another Saber in tow this time?_" she thought to herself.

A deviant smile appeared onto the _Witch of Colchis_' lips. She considered that finally, the time spent here wasn't going to be an actual loss.

There were things to be gained from this land.

"_H...h...he...lp..."_

_Not again._

The voices that had assailed me mentally earlier at the village made a comeback as I ran amidst the trees, trailing the charm that was speeding up for reasons unknown to me.

The abruptness with which the voices manifested themselves threw me off, and I nearly missed a step, but luckily, I was able to stop myself from slamming face-first into a tree just in time and keep running after the charm.

"_H...h...he...lp..."_

The voices weren't stopping.

"_H...h...he...lp..."_

They were getting more frequent as I kept on going, continuously ringing inside my ears.

"_Hang on, inside my ears?_" I exclaimed internally, noticing that this was different from what I had experienced back then in the Human Village. The voices weren't in my mind... I was actually _hearing_ them.

I looked back at Keine and Saber, about to ask them wherever or not they could hear what I was hearing. However, the moment I saw their face filled with concern, there was no need to ask.

"Reimu, look ahead, it's a clearing, it's..." Keine said, lifting her finger and pointing it to our front, before her eyes shot wide open in shock.

The density of trees and bushes was lessening around us, and in the direction that Keine had pointed out earlier, I could easily catch a glimpse of an open place filled with short grass.

"_Wait... what's all this stuff in it?"_

As I said these words, I took the final step that transitioned me from the forest to the clearing... and I saw _them _then.

_Them_... what is _them_, you ask?

Inanimate youkai corpses that littered the field. A lot of these were wheezing heavily, like old people at the doorstep of death. Others, in a miserable display of helplessness, tried to move, tried to stand up, only to find that they lacked the strength to even merely sit.

The skin on some of these lesser youkai and fairies wasn't even holding anymore, dripping down their body like some sort of wax.

_The horror..._

"By the blazes of _Hokkai_..." I heard Keine whisper in disbelief behind.

"This is..." Saber said as she jumped to my side, in a tone conveying an equal amount of incredulity.

The remains of a battlefield, or the aftermath of a manslaughter? _What was this exactly_?

There was only one thing from which I could express relief here – the fact that I wasn't seeing all this tainted with that hellish red from before.

**Phantasm 1.3 - END**


End file.
